Over three centuries tourism has changed a lot but, in essence, perhaps it has always been the same.
Ibn Battuta, the great 14th-century Arab traveller and explorer said that travelling left you without words but that afterwards, it made you a great storyteller. Fortunately, over the last three centuries, there have been many people who left an account, be it in the form of a personal diary or travelogue, of what they experienced, what they saw and, above all, what they felt when they had occasion to visit Catalonia.
A favourite destination
Catalonia is usually always the top destination for foreign tourists visiting Spain, ahead of the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands and Andalusia.
These days, travelling from one place to another is easy and quite affordable, but that is exceptional because it wasn't always like that. If we had a time machine we could find out about the experiences of travellers in the past by going back to the origins of tourist Catalonia. Our time machine is the power of words because words can transport us through time and space and it will be words that accompany us on this journey where the travellers will be the famous people in history who were fortunate enough to enjoy the privilege of discovering the world that awaited them within our borders.
Pyrenees at Ripollès (Joe Calhoun / Wikipedia Commons)
The first tourists of the 18th century: the Grand Tour
The English writer and essayist, Arthur Young, who visited Catalonia in 1787, was one of the privileged aristocrats who was able to travel around Europe to broaden the mind through what was known as the Grand Tour, a term used for the first time by the travel writer, Richard Lassels. He coined the phrase in 1670 to describe the journeys undertaken at the time by young British aristocrats. The Grand Tour was associated with the thirst for knowledge and the social prestige associated with the luxury of foreign travel to far-off lands just for pleasure in times of war, hunger and a rigid social class structure. These tours would include visits to world-famous art centres but they also made it possible to observe daily life in other countries and were therefore regarded, for some, as an excellent fountain of information and as an interesting source of novelties for others.
In July 1787 the English agriculturist Arthur Young travelled to Catalonia. Over the course of twelve days he was able to admire the design of the port of Barcelona, see Montjuïc castle and experience the busy hustle and bustle of the city as it went about its business. But he was also able to admire the beauty of the countryside and the landscapes of the Maresme, Girona, the Empordà and L’Anoia. His account is particularly enlightening because his descriptions are of Catalonia before the industrial revolution. He was fascinated by the activities in the port and the district of Barceloneta about which he wrote, "since only seamen, humble shop-owners and craftsmen live there, the houses are small and low".
Arthur Young (Reproduced by Walter & Boutall / Wikipedia Commons)
English tourists in Campagna (Carl Spitzweg / Wikipedia Commons)
Young was not the only illustrious personage to visit Catalonia. The writer Henry Swinburne lived in Barcelona for some months and there were many others who, like him, discovered the city. Amongst them were the geologist Joseph Townes and Giacomo Casanova, whose visit was for sentimental reasons, something that will not surprise those familiar with this Venetian adventurer.
Swinburne's eclectic account of his travels in Catalonia in 1775 is full of religious, economic and political observations, as well as anecdotes. This son of the English nobility turned his notebooks into two volumes of travel writing entitled Travels through Spain.
L'Empordà (Unknown / Wikipedia Commons)
18th century French engraving of the port of Barcelona (Unknown / Wikipedia Commons)
The popularisation of the city in the 19th century
By the beginning of the 19th century Catalonia had prospered much more than the rest of Spain. The resounding defeat of 1714 lay far behind and during the 18th century and opening years of the 19th the groundwork was laid for the long and laborious process of economic growth based on three main pillars: agricultural specialisation, the cotton industry and trade with America.
These activities set the scene for the Industrial Revolution when it arrived in 1830. Thanks to the textile industry a new economic model was born which redefined the social fabric of Catalonia and brought two new classes into existence: the industrial bourgeoisie and the working class. The first hotels were built, such as the Quatre Nacions in the Rambla, where the writer Charles Nodier stayed in 1827 as did, ten years later, Stendhal. The author of The Charterhouse of Parma was able to witness at first hand the ravages of the first Carlist War while, at the same time enjoying the city's future icon, the Rambla.
Photograph from the year 1860 (approximately) of the shareholders and engineers who pushed the Barcelona Mataró train, the first railway line in the peninsula (Unknown / Wikipedia Commons)
View of La Rambla (2006) (Mike Grote / Flickr)
Another writer enamoured of the various stretches of this iconic avenue in Barcelona was the Danish author of the famous tales for children, Hans Christian Andersen. While it is true that his stay at the Hotel Oriente in 1862 was chaotic because it coincided with one of the worst floods in the city's history, he nevertheless declared Barcelona to be the "Paris of Spain". He would watch people passing by and take notes about their appearance. The men, elegant and smoking, the women, wearing the typical Spanish silk or lace scarf over their head and shoulders. He hadn't thought about it but watching them he noticed how the fashions of both sexes reminded him of Parisian fashion. Highly complementary, no doubt. And on the basis of this observation one might wonder where the women were in these journeys to Catalonia.
Women were there right from the start of the tourist phenomenon. Lady Holland, was one of the first women to travel to the Iberian peninsula for purely touristic reasons, noting in her diary her experiences during her visit to Barcelona in 1802 and commenting, not only on the attractions of the Ramblas, but also on the fact that it was possible to travel everywhere in the city by carriage. Her visit took her to the main religious buildings in the city as well as the monasteries, and included visits to Figueres, Girona and Mataró.
As a consequence of the Universal Exposition of 1888 the transport network was finished, leading to the industrialisation of transport and the involvement of the public administrations, two factors that explain the appearance of organised tourism during the final decades of the 19th century.
Portrait of Stendhal (Olof Johan Södermark / Wikipedia Commons)
The Arc de Triomf, built as the main entrance to the grounds of the 1888 Exposition (Cornell University Library / Wikipedia Commnons)
The flowering of tourism in the 20th century
With Europe shaken by the ravages of the First World War there appeared, between 1914 and 1918, the phenomenon of war tourism, as people sought to flee the war. These people witnessed the hustle and bustle of early 20th-century Barcelona and they would have an influence on the impending avant-garde, such as the French artist Francis Picabia. It was precisely at this time that Barcelona's Chinatown and Paral·lel districts became popular and Barcelona's cosmopolitan panorama of the 1920s began to take shape by attracting artists with the performance of cabarets, theatre productions and the appearance of more than 150 cafés around the city.
It was at this time that Oscar Wilde's nephew, the poet Arthur Cravan, boxed at the Monumental; Georges Bataille frequented the most popular establishments of the day in a manner worthy of imitation today; a highly-impressed Simone de Beauvoir drank chocolate, and ate turron and cakes accompanied by her husband Jean-Paul Sartre, and the architect Le Corbusier dreamt of a Barcelona that was never to be, although he did show his ambitious plans for the city to Lluís Companys in 1933.
Terrace of Café Español around 1910 (Josep Gaspar / Wikimedia Commons)
Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir around 1939 (Unknown / Wikipedia Commons)
After the Spanish Civil War and during the post-war period during the Franco regime the most noteworthy touristic visits were by people involved in the film industry with headlines noting the presence of such eminent visitors as the film director Orson Welles, and the famous actresses Elizabeth Taylor and Ava Gardner, who visited the Costa Brava. When the US fleet was in port sailors were given shore leave to visit Barcelona and, of course, the Ramblas and their presence did much to boost the city's economy as the city began to perceive the benefits of tourism, a process that would become consolidated with the hosting of the 1992 Olympic Games.
Ava Gardner fell in love with Tossa de Mar (Joan Biarnés / Flickr)
Customs that never change
The essence of tourism is to discover and to enjoy but it also implicitly involves a return to the place of origin. It is possibly precisely this that gives travelling its great attraction. It enables people to learn about other places in the world, to see them with a foreigner's eye and to return full of new experiences and tales to tell, or with an unforgettable fragrance in the memory, intimate and evocative.
Tourism centuries after the Grand Tour is not only in full swing, it has expanded in a way those first travellers would never have been able to imagine. It has changed the way we travel and possibly the reasons why we do so. Thanks to the multiple possibilities it presents, characterised by the variety of its landscapes and architecture, Catalonia has been chosen by tourists over the years, it is where the compass has led them, the cross on their maps, the location shown by the app on their phones. Everything and nothing has changed.
