by Jan Morris
The ultimate European tourist destination, by the 1990s, was probably Disneyland outside Paris, an apparently irresistible American implant, but traditionally the fulcrum of international tourism has been Venice, where the horrors of mass travel can be extreme. At the height of the summer the dark entrance to the Basilica San Marco, all but impassably jammed with sightseers, is like a narthex to hell, and the thousands who swarm along the Riva degli Schiavoni are enough to squeeze obscenities out of a saint. It was always so. One of the very earliest paintings of Venice, from the early fifteenth century, seems to show a tourist bending backwards to photograph the crocodile of St Theodore on his pillar in the Piazzetta; a medieval chronicler marvelled at all the Turks, Libyans, Parthians and other Monsters of the Sea who then, as now, sauntered here and there about the Piazza San Marco. In 1959, when I was living in Venice, I compiled a kind of critique of the most numerous European tourists, partly from my own observations, partly from the responses of the Venetians themselves. For example the Germans, I reported, were loud, pushy and moved in regiments – the French were nearly all delightful – the British provided the best of the men and the most dispiriting of the women – things like that. None of it is true now, I think. Europeans have become harder to distinguish. The Germans are less noisy than they used to be, the English less gentlemanly, the French a little less delightful. I used to flatter myself I could tell the nationality of a European tourist group almost at a glance, but now it is only the language of their guide that tells me – and even that, expressed as it is likely to be in the parroting sing-song of the package holiday, is beginning to be unreliable.
50 One gets used to anything
It is the accepted wisdom that mass tourism, by and large, is dreadful. Certainly it has physically ruined many a coastline (for it is essentially a seaside phenomenon) with its second-rate buildings, its marinas and caravan sites. It has degraded many an ancient culture by making profitable parodies of its immemorial attitudes and customs. So ubiquitous has it become, though, so inescapable a part of European society, that probably in the end we shall hardly notice it. Phoney folk-costumes will be more real than real ones. The truest purpose of ancient buildings will be to be shown off to visitors. The theme park will seem as genuine as the historical site. ‘Going to Land’s End?’ a man asked of me in Cornwall one day. ‘Whatever you do, don’t miss the labyrinth.’ But when I got there, hoping for some surf-sprayed maze of caverns within the cliff, I found he was referring to The Legendary Last Labyrinth, The No. 1 Multi-Sensory Experience, which pulsated with wind machines, subsonic audio and twenty-eight picture projectors at the very western tip of England, on one of the supreme allegorical headlands of Europe, one of the most wildly epic of coasts. Huge car parks attended it, I found; ingratiating girls directed me to the admissions office. There was a mock galleon for the kiddies, and the inevitable trolley train. From The Mariner’s Chest seeped out that sickly sachet scent peculiar to Gift Shoppes everywhere, and in the heart of it all was The Unforgettable Experience that Defies the Everyday Limits of Time and Space.
But one gets used to anything. When I walked to the edge of the complex, away from the crowds, I could still feel myself on the edge of the world, as a fierce Atlantic wind whipped out of the sunshine and seemed to bleach the very air of the place. Ships sailed by, a lighthouse stood on a rock, and inland the rocky waste of the Penwith peninsula, seamed with the stone patterns of Celtic farmlands, seemed utterly aloof from the Last Labyrinth. An American woman I met out there appeared to have forgotten about the theme park already. As we stood together in the blast of the wind, with our backs to the Multi-Sensory Experience, she turned to me ecstatically and said, ‘My, it’s like nobody ever stood on this spot before.’
51 Nothing new
Theme parks are nothing new, but in the old days their exhibits were the real thing, not electronic substitutes or plaster casts. At another of Europe’s great headlands, the North Cape at the top end of Norway, far from human habitation in a more or less perpetual maelstrom of winds out of the Arctic, they have lately built an observation chamber, a restaurant, a museum and a few other theme-park essentials, but in fact tourists have been going there for generations. In my grandfather’s time they disembarked from their steamers with some difficulty in small boats below the headland, and then climbed for a few hours up a steep shaly track to the Cape itself, where nothing whatever awaited them except the sensation of being there. By my day we stepped ashore comfortably on a jetty and were driven in warm buses up an excellent road to the headland, stopping on the way for souvenirs at an Authentic Lapp Village. I felt a little guilty, actually: especially when, looking out through thick plate glass at the grey cold sea, with a cup of hot coffee in my hand, I thought of my poor old grandad, queasy I expect from the small boat, clambering gamely up the windswept cliff outside.
52 A beach revived
In the 1960s, when I was writing a book about Spain, I lived for a few weeks in a former fisherman’s cottage on the beach in a small hangdog village called Fuengirola, on the southern coast, the Costa del Sol. All around me was poverty, euphemized in my mind as simplicity. It was the easiest thing in the world to find somebody to do the cooking – everybody wanted a job in Fuengirola. Sometimes I went out on the beach to watch the fishermen pursuing their primitive calling. It could be heartbreaking to watch. They worked like slaves, wading into the sea with their huge net and laboriously hauling it in, inch by inch, hour by hour up the sands: so much depended on that catch, so much labour and good humour had been expended, so many hungry children were waiting to be fed at home – and when at last the haul appeared, a dozen small sardines in the mesh of the net, the fishermen carefully cleared up their tackle and dispersed to their homes in weary silence.
When I was in Fuengirola last I could not even make out where my cottage had stood. High-rise apartments and hotels dominated that once empty beach, no fishermen slogged away at their nets on the sand, and my guess is that if I had needed someone to help with the cooking I would never have been able to afford her fee.
53 The resistance
Of course there is much to be said for tourism in Europe; but naturally there is resistance, too, to touristic spoliation. Even the most avid of tourist authorities sometimes stand back and consider whether enough is not enough. Even Venice closed itself to tourists for a time, a few years back, when the holiday traffic seemed about to overwhelm it, and in 1996 Florence limited its tourist coaches to 150 a day. Elsewhere in Europe there have been sporadic attempts to reconcile tourism with conservation and demonstrate that a holiday resort need not necessarily ruin a landscape. In southern Spain, and in the South of France, there have been attempts to stop the rot by building tourist villages in local styles, mock pueblos, sham fishing-villages, which have a certain pathetic heroism to them.
By the 1990s the Balearic islands of the Mediterranean were especially horribly degraded by tourism – so horribly that the Spanish themselves used the verb ‘balearizar’, to Balearize – but in Majorca, half a lovely mountain island, half a tourist nightmare, one development had successfully bucked the trend. The peninsular estate called Formentor, at the northern tip of the island, had been acquired in the 1920s by an Argentinian millionaire, who built upon it a hotel conceived in the first place especially as a retreat for poets, painters, philosophers and other sensitive vacationists. It became a fashionable resort of the 1930s, and remains today an enclave of calm and restraint in an often frenzied archipelago. Nearly everyone who is anyone has been to Formentor at one time or another, to attend Count Keyserling’s famous pre-war Philosophy Weeks, to listen to chamber music nowadays, or just to hide away among the pine forests on the edge of the silent bay. I spent a few days there once, and found it all so relaxing, so quiet and reserved, so utterly unspoilt and environmentally sympathetic that I ran away to Barcelona.
Much more fun is the most light-hearted of these anti-tourist tourist places, the artificial hotel-village of Portmeirion in
Wales. This was started by the architect Clough Williams-Ellis in the 1930s, to demonstrate that tourism need not be unsightly and profit need not be heedless. It is a highly entertaining mélange of architectural styles, some of its buildings rescued from demolition elsewhere, some indigenous, some the architect’s own creations, part Welsh, part Italianate, with a Portofino campanile and a Gothic town hall, a camera obscura and a colonnade, the whole put together in a whimsically self-amused way on a peninsula rich in rhododendrons overlooking the Irish Sea. The cunningly arranged vistas are delightful; the architectural embellishments are endearingly excessive, as though Williams-Ellis simply could not keep his exuberance in check. From across the water Portmeirion looks like some rich man’s folly, towers and high-pitched buildings disposed happily at the water’s edge as if for pure amusement, and in a way it is: but its original intention was serious too, and it remains an elegant and humorous plea for civilized values in the holiday trade.
In the middle of Bremen another man of vision built, in the 1920s, the alley of cultural tourism called Böttcherstrasse. Ludgwig Roselius had made a great fortune by inventing decaffeinated coffee, and he invested it by buying up, one by one, the properties along the former Street of the Coopers, and having the whole thing redesigned under the inspiration of the art-nouveau sculptor Bernhard Hoetger. It is a street of infinite surprise, all built in handsome red brick and enlivened by every kind of nook, courtyard, quaint sculpture, curious allusion, joke and Germanic grace-note. There are art shops, bookshops, restaurants, a hotel, a cinema, a concert studio, a casino and a museum dedicated to the memory of Robinson Crusoe, whose family came from Bremen. The street is only a hundred yards long, but you never know what you will find next. Goldsmiths, potters and glass-blowers ply their crafts. Buskers play Bach on the violin. Here a carillon of porcelain bells rings a selection of sea-shanties, here there is displayed the silver treasure trove of the Company of the Black Heads of Riga. The Nazis hated Böttcherstrasse.
In a small courtyard halfway down the street Hoetger placed a Fountain of the Seven Lazy Men. These well-known Bremen brothers of legend were too bone idle to fetch water from the river, to chop wood in the forest, or to pull their carts out of the mud; so instead they sank a well, planted trees, and cobbled the village street. It is an apposite place to ponder the moral of the tale, because scornful as they have been of all the tourist orthodoxies, down the years Formentor, Portmeirion and Böttcherstrasse have one and all made heaps of money.
54 Taking the waters
The first sort of European tourism, I suppose, was travelling to take the waters, which has been happening at least since Roman times. Taking the waters enabled people to enjoy themselves and improve themselves at the same time. The first of the spas was Spa itself, a small town in the Ardennes mountains of Belgium, whose curative springs the Romans originally discovered, and which used to be known simply as The Spa: later spas have always been among the most cosmopolitan of European towns, where people of many nations have met in common valetudinarian pursuits – ‘spaing’, as the English used to say in the nineteenth century, or ‘getting spa’d’. They have often been culturally distinguished. Celebrated architects have been proud to design their buildings – Karl Schinkel built the pump-room at Aachen in Germany, Friedrich Weinbrenner the magnificent Kurhaus at Baden-Baden, the two John Woods made their names at Bath. The art-nouveau virtuosi Ármin Hegedüs and Artúr Sebestyén designed the Géllert spa hotel at Budapest – the only capital city, by the way, to be a spa as well.
Writers, composers and artists have frequented the spas, novelists and film-makers have used them as settings, and they have often been centres of fashionable life, especially when their facilities have included gambling casinos. Bad Homburg in Germany gave its name to the Homburg hat. Vichy is where vichysoisse was invented. The spas have also played peculiar political roles in European history. At Vichy, for instance, the humiliated French Government of 1940 set up its headquarters; to Baden-Baden the neutral embassies were compulsorily withdrawn when Germany faced defeat in 1945; Aachen was Charlemagne’s capital; at the original Spa, in 1918, the last Emperor of Austro-Hungary held his final meeting with the last Kaiser of Germany; half the political leaders of Europe, and many of the crowned heads, hobnobbed at one time or another over the Bohemian cures for their rheumatism or obesity. At the spa hotel of Bad Kreuznach, in 1917, the generals of the German High Command had their headquarters, and were visited by their ally Atatürk: thirty years later Adenauer and de Gaulle met in the same building to lay the first foundations of the European Union. There are hundreds of active spas in Europe still, and until well into the 1990s every taxpayer in Germany, where spa treatments have been most popular of all, was entitled to a free four-week Kur every three years.
55 Mirrors of history
The spas have often been historical mirrors or indicators. One of the most historically charged of elegies is an Anglo-Saxon lament about the ruins of Roman Bath, Aquae Sulis: on the other hand an oddly comforting European phenomenon is the ability of the spas, Bath included, to ride the tides of history. Two of the most resilient of them have been Carlsbad and Marienbad, which in this century alone thrived in one name or another under monarchical, Fascist, Communist and democratic systems. They stood agreeably forested in the part of Bohemia known as the Sudetenland, populated largely by Germans, and in the prime of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Empire the fashionable classes of all Europe enjoyed themselves there.
After the First World War the spas became part of the new Czechoslovakia, between the wars they were annexed by Germany, after the Second World War they were subject to the Czechoslovak Communist People’s Republic. By the time I got there, in the late 1950s, one could hardly recognize them as places of pleasure at all. They were called Karlovy Vary and Mariánské Lázně then, all the Sudeten Germans had been expelled, and they were the preserves of Communist Party officials and labour unions, gloomily in the Stalinist thrall. Workers’ Groups morosely sampled the health-giving waters. Girls of Youth Associations sauntered in frumpish crocodile. Comrade Doctors and Curators ran museums and administered colonic treatments. The Grandhotel Pupp at Karlovy Vary, probably the most famous of all spa hotels, was renamed the Hotel Moskva.
Twenty years later the two old resorts began to emerge once more into the democratic daylight, and when I drove there again in the 1980s I was delighted to find that some of the road signs had taken to calling them Carlsbad and Marienbad once more. By the mid-1990s they were very nearly back to their old gaiety. Bands played beneath their colonnades. The Pupp was the Pupp again. You could drink hot chocolate on Edwardian terraces, looking up at roofs rich in bottles, turrets and whirligigs. The Emperor Franz Josef himself, I thought, might easily come hobbling down the river boulevard at Carlsbad, with his white-jacketed sword-clanking aides; Admiral Tirpitz or Edward VII of England might well be staying at the old Weimar Hotel in Marienbad, emancipated from its long impersonation as a trade-union hostel. Long before, the old world of Germanness had reached a serene apotheosis here, and now as the century closed the spas offered its sensations in wistful echo.
The Germanness of Sudety had been one of the causes of the Second World War, enabling Adolf Hitler to advance his claims upon Czechoslovakia (and the Poles and Hungarians to retrieve other bits of it). By 1995 the very name of the Sudetenland was largely forgotten, and there were virtually no German residents. Lots of people, however, understood German still – the German frontier was close – and nearly all the foreign visitors were German. I went to the Casino Marienbad hoping for a blackjack flutter, but found to my consternation that its cavernous central salon had been taken over by hundreds and hundreds of middle-aged German tourists, sitting at long benches, laughing, talking hard and eating largely. The woman at the reception desk was amused by my dismay, and her own response was a kind of historical commentary itself. ‘A whole trainload of them,’ she said in mock consternation. ‘Imagine, one whole train of Germans! Good business. Think
what they eat.’
56 From The Ruin (circa A D 700), translated from the Anglo-Saxon by R. K. Gordon
Wondrous is this wall-stone; broken by fate, the castles have decayed; the work of giants is crumbling … the place has sunk into ruin, levelled to the hills, where in times past many a man light of heart and bright with gold, adorned with splendours, proud and flushed with wine, shone in war-trappings, gazed on treasure … Stone courts stood here; the stream with its great gush sprang forth hotly; the wall enclosed all within its bright bosom; there the baths were hot in its centre; that was spacious …
57 ‘That was spacious’
Bath may have been a sad ruin in A D 700, a memorial to the giants of Rome, but it recovered to become one of the most beautiful of the European spas, and one of the chief English tourist destinations. I had an apartment there for a time in the 1970s, and came to find its inescapable Georgian elegance a little monotonous, but I do recognize its splendour. There is a revelatory moment in Bath that I particularly used to enjoy. It is among the most famous of English architectural surprises, and I liked experiencing it best by car, with the roof open and something blithe and brilliant on the tape – Mozart, Mendelssohn, or Astaire singing Cole Porter. Then I would swing exhilaratingly around the Circus, the architectural centre-piece of Georgian Bath, and head down the short straight link road called Brock Street. I used to pretend to myself that I had never been there before, and for visual reasons drove slap down the middle of the street. At the end of it there seemed to be a vacancy – cloud, trees, a snatch of green in the middle distance, a transverse terrace beyond. A park? A football ground? A demolition site? The street-plan gave nothing away; the vacancy remained vacant; only that sense of impending space grew as I approached the end of the street; and then, narrowly avoiding the milk-van which, in a less exuberant condition, emerged aghast from Upper Church Street, I would top the barely perceptible rise, ease myself around the corner, and find before me one of the most splendid tours de force of European design, John Wood the Younger’s Royal Crescent, which is really no more than a terrace of speculatively built houses, but looks like a magnificently symmetrical palace. I have seen visitors stopped in their tracks when, reaching that same spot on Brock Street, they have discovered this glorious scene in front of them: but they may only have been stunned by my own simultaneous passage around the corner, blaring joyous music on the wrong side of the road.
