«Todo menos mirar con indiferencia»: la Iglesia católica y la prensa británica ante el turismo y los trajes de baño femeninos en España (1950-1965)

Abstract

From the beginning of the 1950s, the visits of tourists from abroad to the Spanish coasts became more and more frequent. The massive influx of visitors meant the arrival of remarkable novelties in fashions and customs, especially in places of leisure, where they had contact with the national population. This paper aims, on the one hand, to analyse the discourses from the Spanish Catholic Church, an institution very concerned about the moral control of Spanish women and women’s summer fashion, but whose arguments have not been studied in detail in relation to tourism. On the other hand, it incorporates a new approach by collecting the opinions expressed in the British press, which allows us to observe the impact of this type of discourse in one of the leading countries in the emission of tourists. For that purpose, we have used different bibliographical sources, archival and newspaper documentation related to tourism and the Catholic religion, as well as British newspapers.