Why Travel? — A 21st Century Existential Crisis

Gail Pellett
27 min readSep 7, 2018
Barcelona. Photo: The Guardian

The graffiti screams and shocks. A human silhouette sprayed in black on a wall with a red target blasted on its head and the words “Why call it the tourist season if we can’t shoot them?” This is Barcelona where militants have slashed tires and set fire to tourist buses; where hotels have been paint-bombed and demonstrators filled the streets in a growing resistance movement to mass tourism that many locals see as destroying their city. An article in Euro News states: “The problem has a name: “terramotourism” or tourism earthquake.”

Barcelona. Photo: The Guardian

Opposition is ratcheting up in major tourist destinations around the world — not only in the major cities of Europe. From the closing of heavily trafficked beaches in Bali while tons of tourist garbage is cleared to the banning of visitors from a popular tropical island in Thailand and the UNESCO pronouncements about Venice. The city is dying under the weight of mass tourism.

Venice should be a warning. Once a rich and boisterous financial and trading capital, Venice has witnessed it’s local population shrink to about 50,000 — a third of it’s population in the 1950s — while 20 million tourists annually invade from cruise ships and jumbo jets…

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Gail Pellett
Gail Pellett

Written by Gail Pellett

Director, producer of documentary films for PBS, features for NPR, author "Forbidden Fruit - 1980 Beijing," articles for Washington Post, Mother Jones, & more

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