Introduction
Forget what you thought you knew about Spain. This is Catalonia, a land whose rich history and culture are distinctly different from those in the rest of the Iberian Peninsula. Once an independent kingdom, in many ways Catalonia still feels like a land apart. (Thomas Cook Travellers—Catalonia guidebook, 2005Footnote 1 )
The Costa Brava was one of Europe’s most popular tourist destinations for several decades starting in the 1950s and an exemplar of modern mass tourism in the post-war period. At the time, its attractions were defined, in both cultural content and political function, by the centralism of the Franco regime. Explicitly nationalist by design, the region’s attractions promoted narratives of Spain’s homogeneity and national harmony. But, as we can see in the quote above, various domestic and global developments had flipped tourism narratives on their head by the early 2000s. Perhaps this is unsurprising, as after Franco died in 1975 and Spain returned to democracy in 1978, a mass nationalist movement emerged in the region of Catalonia that culminated in a failed independence referendum in 2017. As much as this excerpt from a Thomas Cook guidebook would not have made any sense to visitors in the 1960s or 1970s, we might expect a similarly overt, if opposing, political Catalan nationalism to be the root of such a separatist narrative. I argue that the reality is far more complex. While Catalonia’s tourism industry certainly reinforced the ideology of political nationalists through images, branding, and narratives, tourism was not simply a tool of the movement, nor was its development motivated by regional politics. Rather, the production, projection, and popularisation of nationalist narratives in the tourism industry were a response to shifting ideas about cultural authenticity and the demands of global economic competition during this period.
The late twentieth century witnessed two transformative trends. The first was a new era of globalisation beginning in the late 1970s and continuing into the twenty-first century. The second was a wave of new, and often potent, nationalisms emerging in the wake of the Cold War. While the contemporaneous rise of international cooperation and nationalist divergence may seem paradoxical at first glance, these two trends are neither discrete nor incidental. Rather, they are both rooted in a nationalist understanding of the world. That is, of a world broken up into and brought together by various nations and their socio-cultural, political, and economic interaction. Increasingly, in the period following the Second World War, the nation-state became the lens through which people made sense of various, even divergent, political projects.Footnote 2
Catalonia, while not a nation-state, is a uniquely fruitful case to study these developments for several reasons. On the one hand, the region was deeply rooted in the global processes of the period, as it eagerly embraced the arrival of a new regime of international capital and fully supported integration into the European Union. On the other, it is also home to one of the most potent nationalist movements in the West, which rejects the monocultural nationalism of Franco’s Spain and makes its case on the terms of cultural diversity and mutual respect.Footnote 3 Indeed, the Catalan nationalist movement, or Catalanisme, exists at the intersection between nationalism and internationalism, provincialism and universalism, chauvinism and cosmopolitanism. After the end of the Franco dictatorship and Spain’s return to democracy, Catalanisme was strengthened by internationalism and processes of globalisation and can largely be defined by how it responded to the era’s global challenges and opportunities. Indeed, newfound channels to monetise and export cultural products enabled the spread of Catalan language, history, and culture; these channels, such as global sport, digital media, international higher education, and foreign investment proved crucial to promoting the idea of the region as a distinct political entity.
International tourism was among the most significant of these channels. More than just an industry experiencing consecutive and accumulating booms as the twentieth century wore on, tourism emerged as a primary medium through which people encountered other peoples, places, and cultures.Footnote 4 In this context, a newfound importance of cultural authenticity reconfigured the relationship between tourism and nationalism. Rooted in the economic imperative to create a unique brand in a newly international and cultural marketplace, new promotional discourse helped produce notions of cultural authenticity that both characterised and enhanced practices of tourism consumption while essentialising national difference. This development illustrates how processes of globalisation did not do away with the nationalism of the mid-twentieth century but rather sustained such ideas in a new global framework.
This research traces a turning point in the relationship between tourism and nationalism motivated and mediated by processes of globalisation. As such, it engages several significant themes within global history, including the relationship between local and global forces, the role of identities in a globalised world, and the mechanisms behind territorialisation of space. These themes are similarly bound up in scholarship on nationalism, which has increasingly focused on the cultural dynamics and the horizontal spread of nationalist ideologies since the seminal theoretical works of the 1980s.Footnote 5 Nation branding has emerged as a useful tool in understanding neoliberal nationalisms.Footnote 6 Most historical work on nation branding focuses on explicit efforts or programmes by states or similar actors. Here, by contrast, I showcase how private actors and international publics embraced nation branding in response to global commercial trends.
This focus on commercialised culture contributes to a developing literature which considers sub-state regions in their capacity as sites of cooperation and competition or alternative identity creation.Footnote 7 As Liah Greenfeld argues, while capital and economic structures have gained increasing importance in geopolitics, the nation-state has cemented its place as the primary unit of international politics.Footnote 8 This research provides a historical account of the entangled and mutually constructive relationship between these developments, and the role of sub-state actors in this new arrangement.
I have chosen to explore this phenomenon using the province of Girona as a case study for three reasons. First, the province’s Costa Brava was the primary site of mass tourism development in Catalonia during the Franco years. Second, today, Girona remains among Spain’s most popular destinations, receiving more than 5.6 million international visitors in 2017.Footnote 9 However, its attractions have changed significantly since it became a popular destination in the post-war period. The province now boasts an incredible diversity of attractions and destinations from bustling cities to sleepy villages, beaches to mountains, and world-class cuisine to ancient heritage. Finally, Girona’s role in fostering and promoting Catalan nationalism is traditionally understudied in a literature that primarily focuses on Barcelona.Footnote 10 Often, other provinces beyond the metropole are discussed only in their capacity as a romanticised home of folkloric and ancient traditions.Footnote 11 This research moves past this minimisation and argues that the outer provinces of Catalonia are active sites of image creation, identity construction, and promotion. More broadly, it explores the internal dynamics of regional nationalist movements and how contested images disseminate across new linkages between regions, states, and international audiences in an era of increased global connectedness.
As information and ideas travelled through these new connections, ideas about authenticity emerged as important mediators of their validity and significance. There are myriad scholarly approaches to the concept of authenticity, including as an ethical standard, a paradox, a necessary category of social communication, and key facet of individual or collective identity.Footnote 12 Often rooted in critical theory, these approaches describe authenticity as a concept constructed in a variety of ways and typically attempt to understand how claims to or ideas of authenticity function in a specific context. In the tourism industry, authenticity operates as not just a social construct but also as a commercial one.Footnote 13 Authentic culture is a powerful marketing concept that not only differentiates local tourism products from competitors but also appeals to travellers who seek to avoid the reputation of the vulgar tourist.Footnote 14 In their capacity to influence identity formation of both touring guests and local hosts, notions of authenticity perform a profoundly political function. Historians have shown that tourism was a primary tool with which the Franco regime engaged the world; it is useful for global historians to think about how its function changed in a new global era, and what remained the same.Footnote 15
In this article, I explore claims to authenticity in the context of Catalonia’s tourism industry, which emerged as shrewd marketing language in the increasingly competitive tourism market of the 1980s and 1990s. Specifically, local administrators, industry professionals, and international media created attractions and used language to intentionally delineate Catalonia as historically, linguistically, culturally, and politically different from Spain and, indeed, the rest of the world. Such marketing of national difference in pursuit of tourist dollars amounted to an increasingly privatised form of public diplomacy that helped spread the ideology of Catalanisme abroad. Importantly, this was not a choreographed effort by professed Catalan nationalists. Rather, economic incentives for tourism administrators, businesses, and media outlets, as well as the shifting tastes of international tourists during a period of profound economic and technological globalisation motivated the Catalanising of the Costa Brava and the rest of the region’s tourist attractions. This Catalanisation helped spread a nationalist understanding of Catalonia in the world, but was not the result of an explicitly nationalist project. I argue that this relationship between tourism and nationalism relied on and sustained an ontology of marketable and consumable national difference. Increased global interconnectedness mediated by commercial interactions popularised this conception of national difference in a manner and scale new to this period.
While this particular articulation of the relationship between tourism and nationalism was new in the post-Franco period, tourism and nationalism have been significantly intertwined since at least the mid-twentieth century. In many ways, a history of Spain’s tourism boom in the years following the Second World War sets the historical and political groundwork for this research.Footnote 16 During this period, the regime’s infamous Minister of Information and Tourism, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, utilised mass package tourism to open the country up to a sceptical international community as well as to paint Spain as a culturally and politically homogeneous entity. This study extends Justin Crumbaugh’s work into the post-democracy period, when globalisation allowed regional actors to wield this power in new ways that sought to emphasise cultural heterogeneity.
The relationship between tourism and nationalism, however, has a broad and long history. Grand tours of the late-nineteenth century prepared young men of means for aristocratic roles later in life while expanding tourism in the early twentieth century was often used for nation-building purposes.Footnote 17 During the Cold War, tourism was used by many governments as a tool of diplomatic and cultural exchange.Footnote 18 While this study builds on historical scholarship about the function of tourism and nationalism in a Spanish context, it also has a far greater scholarly resonance. By employing a theoretical body of literature on the function of tourism, it engages themes significant to global historians. It does so by placing domestic developments in Catalonia firmly within the context of globally significant changes in communication technology, human mobility, and cultural encounter.
As I will explore, this constellation of global forces interacted with domestic developments to enable the profound reconceptualisation of Catalonia’s territory, culture, and language. These forces have received continued scholarly attention in their own right, inasmuch as they helped constitute new models of tourism across the world. Large-scale commercialisation of standardised tourism products exemplified by coach tours and package holidays characterise Fordist tourism, which dominated the industry after 1945. The latter half of the twentieth century saw a shift to a post-Fordist model, as hallmarks of technological and economic globalisation such as increased consumer access to information, a broad shift to personalised consumption, greater ease in the flow of international capital, and transportation revolutions made travel easier.Footnote 19 This new model represented a move away from large-scale tourism consumption to more segmented, diversified tourism products, which are often (but not exclusively) focused on ‘unique environmental, cultural and social landscapes’.Footnote 20 The scale of post-Fordist tourism, paired with an increased demand for unique cultural experiences, was particularly well-suited to conveying popular national myth to international audiences.Footnote 21
The relationship between post-Fordist tourism and Catalan nationalism, however, has not been explored by an otherwise robust interdisciplinary scholarship that investigates various aspects of nationalisms in Spain, including their cultural dynamics, political manifestations, and its relationship with the Spanish state.Footnote 22 When it comes to their respective relationships with tourism, nationalism in Spain and Catalonia has been studied in both scholarly and fictional works but in quite specific ways.Footnote 23 For example, the 1992 Barcelona Olympics is often a subject of study owing to its attractions of millions of visitors to various parts of the region and hyper-politicised nature of the games’ production.Footnote 24 Similarly, the case of the Catalan-speaking Balearic Islands provides a cautionary tale as an example of over-tourism. It also provides some insight into the vulnerability of Catalan culture without the protection of the regional government.Footnote 25 This study, however, seeks to understand the dynamics of popular tourism that are not so commonly explored. These include its significant political, if less-overtly politicised, function and its ability to support and promote local culture, rather than threaten it.
In this article, I mobilise a variety of sources, including negotiations on political devolution, annual reports from local tourism boards, international promotional literature, travel guides, and more to explore how Spain’s transition to democracy and developments in the tourism industry implicitly incentivised the international public to regard Catalonia as a unique cultural, historical, and political entity. First, I argue that economic motivations spurred the devolution of powers of tourism to the regional government of Catalonia during Spain’s transition in the late 1970s. Second, I explain the structural changes in the tourism industry from the 1980s to 2000s and show how tourism became a primary medium for an increasingly large number of people to learn about the world and other cultures. Finally, I describe how this combination of local and global processes revolutionised the narrative surrounding Catalonia and how this change promoted nationalist perspectives.
Tourism during this period, and cultural encounter more broadly, acted as an important mediator between processes of globalisation and nationalism. By popularising ideas of consumable authenticity, such practices reinforce an ontology of essential national difference that is not just compatible with, but foundational to, nationalist narratives. This particular configuration of the relationship between tourism and nationalism is new to this period and has continued to develop since the 1990s. It is not, however, limited to Catalonia, Spain, or Europe, as we see similar developments in the Basque Country, Wales, Mozambique, Vietnam, and beyond.Footnote 26 Such a historical investigation of this development advances our understanding of the evolving place of the nation-state from the 1970s to today.
Tourism, devolution, and regional governance
The winter of 1973 was turbulent for citizens of the United Kingdom. The energy crisis precipitated by OPEC’s oil embargo and industrial action undertaken by British coal miners brought on a general election, a minority government, and fear over rising energy prices. Amidst all the upheaval, not to mention the cold, Brits could be forgiven for eagerly anticipating their escape to warmer shores on their summer holidays. Luckily for them, Summer 1974 holiday catalogues soon made their appearance in travel agents’ high street storefronts to brighten up the cold winter days with promises of sun and sand on the shores of Portugal, Italy, Greece, and beyond. For most British would-be holidaymakers, Spain was the preferred destination. Those shopping in Clarksons Sunshine ’74 catalogue could choose from options across the Balearic and Canary Islands as well as the Costas Tarragona, Blanco, Almeria and more. Thumbing through these pages, one would find an array of light-coloured hotels and balconies overlooking communal pools, where bikini-clad women and smiling children assured hopeful travellers of relaxing summer fun. Clarksons’ offerings on the Catalan Costa Brava featured more of the same. Amongst several resort towns, Lloret de Mar was proclaimed ‘probably the most famous and lively resort in the area’, attracting ‘a sun-tanned set that returns again and again’.Footnote 27 No matter which resort they chose, holidaymakers could fight the hot summer sun with hallmarks of Spanish mass tourism, including a refreshing sol y sombra by the pool before taking in a bullfight at the José Luis Andrés Bullring or heading downtown for a flamenco show and steins of beer at the local German Beer house. Though none of these activities had any roots in or connection to Catalonia, few cared, as all that separated winter-weary Brits from beach bliss was a £40 ticket and a short flight from Luton.
This was the state of the Costa Brava and the image presented to international tourists under the Franco regime.Footnote 28 Despite the dictatorship’s violent repression and links to European fascism in the 1930s and 1940s, Franco’s Spain became a hotspot for western European tourists in the decades following the Second World War. Cheap flights and coastal vacation packages lured millions of British travellers to the Spanish islands and coasts every year in the 1950s and 1960s, but by the turn of the century, these wildly popular tours would fall out of fashion. By the late 1990s, visitors to the Costa Brava would not find bullfights or flamenco, nor would they be seeking them. The popularity of the region’s beaches did not go away, but alternative destinations like Girona, Figueres, and Cadaqués—and their cultural and artistic significance—would come to the fore. The Costa Brava remained one of Europe’s most popular destinations, but the specific nature of the tourists’ visits, desired attractions, patterns of consumption, and what their holidays meant would transform not only the Costa Brava and the Province of Girona but the way people thought about Catalonia itself.
There were two primary causes for this shift. Advancements in communication and transportation technology made travel cheaper and more accessible to new populations, sparking a revolution in what travellers sought and what popular tourism products offered. This will be discussed in the next section. The other cause was domestic in nature, namely the death of Francisco Franco in 1975 and Spain’s subsequent transition to democracy. During and after this process, which took place in the late 1970s, tourists’ interest in Spain and tourism’s political possibility remained. However, the resulting devolution of government paved the way for significant changes in tourism administration and function on the Costa Brava.
Given historic self-governance and the fresh memories of Francoist repression, officials in the region of Catalonia sought to establish autonomy in many areas of regional governance.Footnote 29 As many scholars have suggested, at least in the later years of the transition, the devolution of powers largely resulted from negotiations held between Spanish and regional authorities.Footnote 30 The manner in which the negotiations over tourism power played out is important, as they provided a platform for regional groups to deploy a new type of soft power that changed the way Catalonia interacted with Europe and the world.
In these discussions, socialist politician Joan Majó represented the Catalan regional government, the Generalitat. His opposite number was former Falangist politician Eduardo del Río Iglesia, who represented the Spanish Secretary of State for Tourism. Over a series of meetings in March and April 1978, the two developed a strong working relationship, making headway on many key points. The issue of international tourism promotion, however, continually flared up throughout the negotiation process, as each fought for exclusive power of international promotion for their respective bodies.Footnote 31 The Royal Decree very clearly gave the Generalitat powers over domestic tourism promotion and the management of local tourism offices but did not clearly define the responsibility of international promotion. Consequently, Majó and Río Iglesia reached an impasse when the latter insisted the power of international promotion remain exclusively within the mandate of the Secretary of State. In a report from 4 July 1978 to the Vice President of the Joint Commission, Catalan politician Josep Lluís Sureda, Majó conceded that they must recognise the coordinating role of the state but that this should not amount to an exclusive competency.Footnote 32 Indeed, he maintained that Río Iglesia’s claim that only the state could coordinate international promotion was not supported by any legal precedent.
Majó was worried. He warned Sureda that if the Generalitat was unable to gain power over international promotion, it would be left out of the decision-making concerning one of the region’s most important economic activities.Footnote 33 He even suggested they postpone the transfer of powers until they came to an agreement on the matter.Footnote 34 Beyond his recognition of the delicacy and political sensitivity of the negotiation’s progress, Majó’s suggestion highlights the incredible importance of international promotion and a desire to retain administrative power for themselves.Footnote 35 The question, then, is why?
A cynical interpretation is that both wanted power over international promotion in order to bolster their side’s nationalist interests at the expense of the other. There is little to support this theory, however. As several scholars have argued, by this period, the regime’s negotiators were largely committed to the devolution process.Footnote 36 Moreover, while there was undoubtedly concern about maintaining Spain’s territorial cohesion, the Francoist hardliners who would have hoped for a renewal of Manuel Fraga Irribarne’s centralising efforts were not the ones carrying out the negotiations. For their part, the Catalans had already committed to the process as well and would soon ratify the new Spanish constitution, acknowledging their place in and subordination to the Spanish nation-state.Footnote 37 Perhaps most importantly, both Spain and Catalonia benefitted from a strong tourism industry in the region, no matter which body carried out its promotion.
The logic behind this final point suggests that both Spanish and Catalan negotiators were acting out of common economic sense. That is, each simply thought they would be better suited to promote regional tourism and generate business—a conclusion for which there is far more evidence.Footnote 38 The two Catalan Statutes of Autonomy further support this interpretation. The first, approved in 1979, mentions tourism exactly once. Under Section One, Article Nine, we learn that the ‘Government of Catalonia has exclusive power over the following matters’. Point Twelve of this section simply reads ‘Tourism’.Footnote 39 Ultimately, both sides were content to leave this matter open-ended so that when the regional government acquired the capacity to promote tourism internationally it could do so. The second Statute of Autonomy, approved in 2006, further supports this narrative, as it explicitly gives the Generalitat power over ‘Promotion of tourism, which includes the signing of agreements with foreign organisations and the creation of offices abroad’.Footnote 40
How exactly did this muddled, open-ended dynamic play out in the intervening years? We find a clarifying example in the creation of the Girona Tourism Board. In an evolving administrative environment, the Board was constituted in December 1976 as a public-private partnership, in which half of the company’s shares were owned by the Provincial Council and the other half by local chambers of commerce, groups, and individuals from the tourism industry.Footnote 41 This solution was designed to be both politically feasible and economically agile at a time when the administrative landscape of Catalonia was still taking shape. Moreover, it responded to Spanish claims that the regional government did not have the capacity to take on international promotion by itself and had the benefit of aligning ideologically with President of the Generalitat Jordi Pujol’s neoliberal approach to Catalan governance during this era.Footnote 42
The Board’s purpose was to act as ‘the administrative organ for all tourism in the province of Girona’.Footnote 43 From the off, it was clear to the Board’s leaders that promoting the region’s tourism products was a task of the utmost importance. The nature of their activities, then, were similar to that of the Francoist authorities they replaced. Specifically, they communicated with international operators to promote tour packages.Footnote 44 The key difference was that the new Board sought to differentiate its own tourism offering from that of the rest of Spain’s tourism destinations, which were now industry competitors.Footnote 45 This task was undertaken not as a nationalist revision but in order to correct an imbalance in the region’s product portfolio, which was overly focused on mass beach tourism. Simply put, money was being left on the table. The popularity of the Costa Brava’s resorts was well established, but other tourism products relating to sport, culture, and cuisine had not received as much attention from the previous regime and were less developed, less popular, and less profitable.Footnote 46
The late 1990s witnessed an even more profound shift. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Board was concerned with hosting journalists, attending trade conventions, strengthening links with tour operators and airlines, publishing promotional material, and placing advertisements for holiday packages in different media. This would change in the decades that followed. No longer concerned with international promotion, the Board strategically redirected its efforts into research and educational activities.Footnote 47 The Board’s international focus shifted from coordinating package holiday offers to educating international audiences about Catalonia itself. Internally, the Board began promoting tourism market research and providing training, statistical information, and support to tourism companies in the province. In order to understand why the Board redirected its focus, we need to look at changes in the global tourism industry, as this development complemented the shifting demand and logic of international tourism.
The global shift to authentic cultural tourism
By its very nature, tourism is a social practice that intricately links local circumstances with global ones. Naturally, then, we must account for the steps taken by Spanish and Catalan officials to promote and stimulate tourism, while also acknowledging the broader context to understand why these steps were undertaken, how they stimulated tourism development in the region, and why they provided such a boon to nationalist ideology. Since the early 1990s, new technologies revolutionised how, why, and where tourists travelled. As destinations welcomed international travellers and were in competition with destinations across the world, the manner in which tourism professionals advertised locations to the world became all the more important. In this context, tourism took on a new political significance due to its increasingly personalised and didactic function as various local actors tried to convince travellers that theirs was a unique and exciting place. Scholars refer to these and associated developments as belonging to a new, post-Fordist model of tourism. In this section, I explore both how these novel dynamics impacted tourism across the world, as well as their manifestation in the province of Girona.
The 1990s and early 2000s witnessed profound geopolitical, economic, and technological change, which exhibited various manifestations in the tourism industry across Europe and the world. Industry commentators recognised that the rise of budget airlines and direct-to-consumer sales presented a fundamental threat to the travel agent and tour operators models by the mid-1990s.Footnote 48 Despite boycotts by agents and, in some cases, governments, direct, online booking became a much cheaper and more desirable option for those booking holidays.Footnote 49 New technologies and industry actors constituted an evolving tourism ecosystem in the 1990s and 2000s. Platforms and services emerged amongst increased popularity of computers, such as Booking.com (created in 1996), Expedia (created in 1996), and Airbnb (created in 2008), which not only allowed consumers direct means of booking accommodations, but also allowed tourists to stay in new parts of the destinations they visited. Websites like Tripadvisor (created in 2000) and a wave of online travel blogs which emerged in the 2000s served as decentralised sources of information about destinations and attractions. These developments made travel cheaper, more accessible, and more popular than ever.
In Spain, specifically, during the early 1990s, inflation led to repeated devaluation of the peseta, which greatly reduced the cost of travel to Spain and led to a boom in popularity.Footnote 50 Consequently, many industry analysts predicted a decline in Spanish tourism after the country’s adoption of the Euro in 2002.Footnote 51 However, the primary effect of this change was the closure of tour operators and travel agents as travellers shifted to buying cheap flights from new companies like Ryanair.Footnote 52 Ryanair’s decision to make Girona’s airport its hub for Barcelona and the Costa Brava supercharged tourism to the region.Footnote 53 The resulting tenfold increase in passengers brought millions of new visitors to the province of Girona, levels which remained higher than before even after Ryanair moved its operations to Barcelona—El Prat in 2008. While the Costa Brava had been popular with British and Northern European tourists since the post-war period, as tourism boomed during this period, regional authorities welcomed and fostered increased traffic from countries across Europe, North America, South America, and Asia as international and intercontinental air travel got cheaper.Footnote 54
Post-Fordist tourism also brought to the fore new consumer priorities and commercialised the tourism experience in new ways. But they impacted more than just industry trends. The new practices were part and parcel of a far more profound epistemological development taking place in the global age. From the 1950s to 1980s, waves of tourists hopped on and off their coach tours, stayed in walled resorts, and enjoyed the beach and buffet dinners, while a new generation of travellers, defined in opposition to this ‘soulless’ mass tourism, armed with seat-only airline fares, local accommodations, and internet research came to explore the ‘authentic’ culture and cuisine of their selected destination.
Authenticity is an imprecise, yet loaded concept with competing definitions, usages, and purposes.Footnote 55 The slippery nature of the term has invited many approaches to unpack its meaning, appeal, and function.Footnote 56 In tourism scholarship, the role of authenticity has a long history and is key to understanding who we call ‘tourists’ or why some prefer to be called ‘travellers’. The putative distinction has, for centuries, been wrapped up in ideas of class and culture. Baranowski and Furlough discuss the class anxieties underlying the early-nineteenth century differentiation between travellers, who considered themselves elite and culturally superior, and those deemed tourists, who were merely part of the modern crowd. While tourists followed guides, travellers relied on their own originality and self-sufficiency in seeking authentic experiences. James Buzard argues that travel writers in the early twentieth century similarly aimed to display marks of originality and authenticity in an attempt to win credit for acculturation. He writes, ‘the authentic “culture” of places—the genius loci—was represented as lurking in secret precincts “off the beaten track” where it could be discovered only by the sensitive “traveller”, not the vulgar tourist.’Footnote 57 Marco d’Eramo argues that this perceived distinction, and the sustaining of authenticity’s social desirability, persists into the twenty-first century.Footnote 58 Indeed, as more people than ever began travelling the world, the tourist/traveller dichotomy took on renewed importance, and authenticity amounted to an incredibly emotive and suggestive tourism product. The social importance, commercial significance, and the resulting ubiquity of claims to authenticity are characteristic of the post-Fordist turn in tourism.
If tourists increasingly demanded authenticity, it was local authorities and businesses who produced its content.Footnote 59 In Girona, this division of labour helps explain certain changes in the activities of the Tourism Board, particularly their shift in the 1990s from an advertising focus to one intent on cultivating localised events, products, and experiences. Promotion of mass tourism, even if it highlighted the Costa Brava’s benefits over its competitors, simply would not bring the same return on investment that it once did. Early efforts in the Board’s new role as stewards of a cultural industry rather than tour promoters reveal that they, too, were trying to work out their own position in this new model of tourism. The Board knew cultural specificity and authenticity was the way forward, but were yet to determine how they would promote this authentic narrative. Slowly but surely, the Board made the shift from direct communication with international travel agents, as ‘the role of the Board [was] no longer the main protagonist of the promotion’.Footnote 60 In the years that followed, the Board would focus more on educating local businesses about global tourism trends and consumers, directly, about Catalonia’s distinctiveness.
This new role exemplifies another characteristic of post-Fordist tourism, that is novel sources of travel expertise. As the influence of large travel companies like Thomas Cook and local travel agents waned, media outlets and tourists increasingly sought out information from new trustworthy sources, which often gained their legitimacy from their connection to local or first-hand knowledge. Buzard terms the authoritative representation of people, landscapes, traditions, and ways of life by locals as ‘autoethnography’.Footnote 61 In Catalonia, this power took on a new significance in the post-Fordist era when local authorities and sources occupied a privileged position when promoting authentic historical, political, and cultural narratives. This authentic representation was mediated in several ways.
It is no accident that those coordinating local tourism were also coordinating various education efforts. This is because, in its post-Fordist manifestation, tourism became an increasingly didactic phenomenon. Thus, we also see global efforts and programmes aimed at cultivating heritage tourism meant to educate visitors about local cultures, landscapes, cuisines, and customs. One example is that of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which began designating World Heritage sites in an effort to conserve and promote cultural spaces and heritage practices.Footnote 62 Beginning in 1978 with twelve cultural sites, UNESCO designated 690 sites by the year 2000, and the list today includes almost 1,200. The creation of these sites, which Aurelie Gfeller has called ‘globalisation of heritage’, provided new attractions for tourists to visit, but also illustrates a change in the meaning of visits themselves.Footnote 63 Indeed, they are a part of a larger trend in tourism in which tourists seek meaningful relationships with or connections to the places they are visiting.Footnote 64 UNESCO sites, then, play an important role in codifying and presenting heritage, and allowing visitors to learn about the unique aspects of the places they visit.Footnote 65
Another place in which we can see the mediation of local knowledge and the didactic development of tourism illustrated is in the catalogue of National Geographic. Started as a scholarly journal in 1888, the magazine gained incredible popularity, peaking in the 1980s with tens of millions of global subscribers and editions printed in nearly forty local language. National Geographic largely retained an anthropological approach until the 1990s, when its focus shifted from specific nations and people, instead producing articles on scientific, natural, and cultural topics. Meanwhile, coverage of and education about specific peoples and places was reassigned primarily to Nat Geo Traveller, a sister publication focused explicitly on travel and tourism. National Geographic no longer targeted academics and intellectually inclined members of the public with information about ‘Catalonia: Spain’s Country within a Country’, but rather couched local politics and cultural information in the context of travel advice about destinations all over the world.Footnote 66 This shift from a scientific, anthropological approach to education to one rooted in tourism illustrates the new ways in which journalists and media outlets were thinking about the possibilities and function of leisure travel. At the same time, the Girona Tourism Board stopped seeking to educate travel agents about local promotions but sought out mass media organisations, such as Nat Geo Traveller, to amplify regional historical narratives in international publications that would directly reach consumers.Footnote 67
Developments in technological and economic globalisation in the late twentieth century helped usher in a post-Fordist model of tourism. This new model represented a drastic shift in what tourists wanted from and learned about destinations. No longer just a relaxing getaway, more and more holidays incorporated a cultural dimension that tourists demanded in order to learn about the authentic ways of being in the places they visited.Footnote 68 The newfound didactic power of this presumed cultural authenticity placed novel demands on local authorities, and their reaction would have profound consequences on the way the international public encountered and spoke about foreign destinations.
Catalanising the Costa Brava
In the decades surrounding the turn of the millennium, perceptions of destinations along the Costa Brava, the Pyrenees, and throughout the province of Girona among international audiences were redefined. There are several reasons for this. On the one hand, the tourism infrastructure and the attractions changed as regional government redeveloped and diversified package resort towns. Investment in regional transportation directed traffic beyond the coasts to places like the city of Girona and the Pyrenees.Footnote 69 As a result, local attention and resources were reallocated to the new foci of the province’s tourist products, including heritage, cuisine, and sport products, rather than just beach tourism. On the other hand, the labels and narratives surrounding these tourism attractions changed. No longer resigned to discussing the region as another of the ‘Spanish coasts’ boasting sun, sea, and sand, local authorities, international tourism professionals, and tourists began speaking and learning about unique Catalan culture, history, and governance. I term these contemporaneous and mutually constitutive processes the ‘Catalanisation’ of the province of Girona.
The Girona Tourism Board employed three primary strategies for development during the 1990s and early twenty-first century. The first is a reclamation of particular cultural practice from Spain. This not only meant getting rid of the bullrings and flamenco but also creating a Catalan image or brand with which the region’s attraction could be associated. The second strategy undertaken by the Girona Tourism Board was to increase awareness of the hallmarks of Catalan culture. The Board used tourism publications and international publicity to promote the Catalan language, traditions such as the sardana and castellers in addition to a specifically Catalan cuisine.Footnote 70
Beyond just promoting existing Catalan heritage, the third strategy taken up by the Board was the creation of new cultural traditions and attractions. This included one-off celebrations such as the Costa Brava Centenari or more permanent installations such as the annual Fires d’Indians celebrated in many Costa Brava municipalities or the related Rutas de Indianos which would later bring EU funding together with local sponsors to form the Xarxa de Municipis Indians.Footnote 71 These attractions focus on Catalans from the Costa Brava who emigrated to Cuba in the nineteenth century to make fortunes in the sugar industry, before returning to the region. Tourism products like these had the dual nationalist benefit of expanding the Costa Brava’s cultural patrimony while simultaneously supporting the narrative of the region and its population as important actors in world history.
These strategies were not disconnected, discrete efforts by the Board but bound up in each other, often mutually constructive and, importantly, all part of the broader Catalanisation process. Their combined result was the ever-increasing particularity of the Catalonia and Girona brand.
We see such effects of these efforts mediated in a range of sources, some of which we have already discussed in this article. The industry publication Travel Weekly began publication of various supplements and features towards the end of the 1990s. Having sent journalists to meet with regional and provincial tourism authorities, the first significant change in Travel Weekly’s reporting was that they included the Pyrenees, Costa Brava, and other Catalan destinations under sections titled ‘Catalonia’ rather than ‘Spain’ starting in 1999.Footnote 72 More specifically, they published specific sections on Catalan scenery, weather, infrastructure, history, culture, food, language, and more. All of the information in these publications was provided by local tourism authorities.Footnote 73
Readers of Thomas Cook European Coach Tours brochures from the 1970s and 1980s might see only two lines about Catalan destinations, and even these were likely referred to as Spanish.Footnote 74 In the early 2000s, however, they began publishing in-depth guidebooks for wide swathes of destinations. In a series of Catalonia-specific guidebooks from this period, tourists learned that ‘Catalonia, though a part of the modern Spanish state, was historically a separate country and has now regained much of its autonomy after centuries of repression’.Footnote 75 Indeed, these 200–300 page guidebooks were bursting with logistical information, destination recommendations, Catalan language lessons, Culture and Governance sections as well as a several-page spread timeline of the history of Catalonia, from 450,000 BC to today.Footnote 76
Similarly, in Nat Geo Traveller, we see the publication of practical articles such as ‘Best of Barcelona and Catalonia’ and ‘Barcelona essentials’ but also more politically charged ones such as ‘Free-spirited Catalonia: this autonomous Spanish region cherishes its independence’.Footnote 77 In all of these publications, local authorities and sources continued their efforts to distinguish Catalonia as a culturally and historically unique place to drive tourism, and in doing so, replicated and repeated nationalist narratives.
These developments in the province of Girona illuminate trends not only in regional politics and thought but also emerging dynamics in the relationship between globalisation and nationalism. Crucially, the promotion of hyper-local culture did not require vulgar nationalism to relay nationalist geographies and ideologies. Rather, in a global tourism market, presenting as unique an identity as possible, and proclaiming its authenticity, was simply a good marketing strategy. In this way, international tourism applied a market logic that draws boundaries around people, places, and cultures, creating discrete entities in competition with one another.
We can consider these developments as a type of Catalan nation branding. Recent scholarship has approached nation branding both as diplomatic practice as well as a consulting industry that has emerged in the last two decades. It can also be a useful heuristic for understanding how the public encounters and understands peoples and places, particularly foreign ones. Employing the concept of nation branding in our investigation of tourism yields some interesting insights into why Catalonia was so successful at altering its international image.
This new branding, by definition, changed how people came to think about Catalonia and its territories. Although it is difficult to measure the reception of public discourse, we can get an idea of what tourists thought from sources that use user-generated content. For example, looking at the travel website Tripadvisor, we can see the way these new encounters helped to cultivate an image and understanding of the region, its history, and culture that would not have been possible in the 1970s.Footnote 78 In the resort town Lloret de Mar, the top attraction is not a beach but the Jardines de Santa Clotilde, which, according to the website, exemplifies ‘the spirit that animated the Noucentista movement in Catalonia—an early twentieth-century movement for intellectual and aesthetic renewal …’.Footnote 79 Another coastal town, Roses, is not noted for its beaches but rather its culture and history: ‘As well as white-sand beaches, this resort town is home to 16th-century fortifications, megalithic tombs, and plenty of modern amenities.’Footnote 80 John H., a user from Halesowen, UK, wrote the following about his experience in el Call Jueu in Girona in 2017: ‘You will find ancient buildings that now remain has (sic) homes, restaurants and shops leading up to the imposing cathedral. There are many restaurants selling high quality food (sic) do not hesitate and try real Catalan food cooked by some great chefs and cooks.’Footnote 81 Each of these reviews and descriptions reveal the international knowledge and appreciation of the province’s unique culture and history.
This awareness had profound implications for the region’s nationalist movement. In the eyes of the international public, Catalonia became a place with a unique history, culture, language, and a precedent for sovereignty, characteristics typically displayed by nation-states. This narrative was enforced not by political nationalism but by the tourism industry. Functionally, this amounts to a privatised form of public diplomacy, in which nation branding was carried out not by governmental actors to improve international reputation but in which public-private partnerships collaborated to change the way international publics conceived of their region in the pursuit of economic gains. Without any marches, speeches, or referendums, let alone armed struggle, tourism in Girona during this period changed the region’s international brand and image, implicitly supporting the efforts of nationalists who agitated for increased sovereignty and even independence. In Catalonia, the international transmission of nationalist ideology did not require explicit nationalism but merely sound economic sense and sophisticated planning in a newly global competitive market.
Conclusion
John Urry’s 1995 book Consuming Places popularised the understanding that even more than purchasing flights, hotels, tours, food, or otherwise sustaining the industry financially, the tourist’s primary function is their gaze. This gaze involves looking ‘individually or collectively upon aspects of a landscape or townscape which are distinctive, which signify an experience which contrasts with everyday experience’.Footnote 82 The tourist’s gaze, Urry suggests, is not focused on random objects. Rather,
An array of tourist professionals … attempt to reproduce ever new objects of the tourist gaze. These objects are located in a complex and changing hierarchy. This depends upon the interplay between, on the one hand, competition between different capitalist and state interests involved in the provision of such objects; and on the other hand, changing class, gender and generational distinctions of taste within the potential population of visitors.Footnote 83
This choreography between tourists and professionals—guests and their hosts—produces meaning from the tourism experience. The reciprocal interaction between these two groups manufactures what tourists see, what they take pictures of, the cultural and historical narratives they encounter, the impressions made on them, and the stories they will tell upon returning home. Importantly, Urry acknowledges that the efforts of the hosts and the interests of the guests are guided not by a random, historical, or political logic but rather by the market. Taste, cost, return on investment, novelty, and status all help determine the contours of tourism development more than historicity or even politics. When we consider the context in which these factors converge, we see that hosts and guests make meaning from the tourist experience not in a vacuum but intimately bound up in domestic and global circumstance.
Throughout this historical narrative, we have seen Catalan hosts and international guests create meaning from Catalan tourism attractions according to Urry’s formulation. The transition to democracy was a profound rupture for Spain and Catalonia in an era of massive global change. These circumstances created a new playing field in which novel powers were available to a new set of actors in Spain and Catalonia. The competing, and sometimes shared, interests of the Catalan Generalitat and the Spanish state and their representatives played out in the negotiation of powers over tourism, but ultimately, both sides were motivated by a desire to succeed in the international tourism market. The shifting tastes of a new generation of tourists throughout Europe and the world ushered in a new post-Fordist model of tourism that privileged authentic local culture. Industry professionals and the Girona Tourism Board reacted in kind by curating and promoting an image and infrastructure that highlighted local culture and distinction from the rest of Spain. The result, the Catalanisation of the region, conditioned the international projection and reception of the Costa Brava, Girona, and the Pyrenees under a strengthened and globalised Catalan brand. This brand promoted Catalan nationalist ideology to a larger audience, in a more consumable product than nationalist political parties could during this period.
When viewed from this perspective, we can understand nationalist divergence not as opposed to or even a reaction against processes of globalisation. Rather, we see them as both relying on and sustaining an ontology of marketable and consumable national difference. The commodification of cultural difference makes such an ontology easy to consume and spread across the globe. This has two effects. On the one hand, it popularises increasingly specific cultural, geographic, linguistic, territorial, or other categories that enter popular discourse and can then be used in political contexts. On the other, it provides a moral justification for increased sovereignty. If a certain region is significantly different, then why shouldn’t they have a right to self-governance? Ironically, such claims of sovereignty or independence often invoke and rely upon the legitimacy of the nation-state while undermining it at the same time.
Indeed, as scholars debate the future of the nation-state in an era of globalisation, we arrive at yet another paradox. While capital flows and economics exert increasing influence on the development of global affairs, the nation-state persists as the fundamental unit and primary reference point of international and domestic politics. In order to understand this paradox, we must account for the role of culture in codifying and commercialising corresponding worldviews. Indeed, in adopting the language of authenticity and the logic of a global market, Catalonia’s hosts and guests helped rebrand Girona, Costa Brava, the Pyrenees, and, ultimately, the nation of Catalonia in the eyes of the international public. These processes, though, are not unique to the region and are increasingly common in a global age. Indeed, as Marco d’Eramo writes, ‘It has become possible for each person—independent of class and income—to be literally a “man of the world”. Certainly, each person will visit myths rather than places.’Footnote 84 As tourists and demands for authenticity become ever more ubiquitous, further research is required to understand how commercialised culture both brings the world together and drives it apart.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Lisa Tiersten and Victoria de Grazia who helped develop this research in its infancy, as well as David Brydan and Nagore Calvo Mendizabal for reading multiple drafts of this manuscript and for their continued guidance. He would also like to thank Heidi Tworek and the other editors and reviewers whose insightful notes helped prepare this manuscript for publication.
Financial support
The author thanks the Arts & Humanities Faculty and History Department at King’s College London for research grants that allowed for the completion of this work.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Max Ferrer is a PhD candidate in the History Department at King’s College London and a member of the CARE International Project at the Wilson Center. He is interested in the cultural, intellectual, and political history of globalisation, internationalism, and nationalism in a European and global context. His work has been previously featured in European Integration and Disintegration: Essays from the Next Generation of Europe’s Thinkers (Routledge, 2022).
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