Now I'm not sure how many times I've been to Sevilla but, without trying too hard, I can easily bring eight or nine visits to mind. The very first time I was there I stayed over three weeks and, as historic centres don't change much, I've always felt to know the heart of the city quite well. The terrible thing is that, looking back at my photo albums, it turns out that the last time we stayed there was fifteen years ago. Seville is a great place to visit. It's just full of Spanish clichés, it brims over with history, culture and life. I've had some interesting experiences in Seville over the years, not all of them pleasant and this time the town surprised me yet again. It wasn't the heat, I didn't get lost or have a run in with anyone. The problem was the sheer number of tourists, us among them, oozing from every nook and cranny. There was as much Korean spoken on the streets as Spanish and heavily accented English, spoken by non native speakers, was absolutely everywhere. A couple of days later we were in the relatively humble provincial capital of Huelva on a busy Saturday night where we were just more customers and not the cash cows we had been in Seville. I liked that much more.
I've mentioned Dígame before. It was a BBC Spanish language course with TV programmes, cassette tapes, a textbook etc. in the 1970s. It was based on the town of Cuenca in Castilla la Mancha. Through the BBC programmes students were introduced to the sights in Cuenca, to some local characters. We watched as people had a picnic by the river or bought their Sunday bread and paper. Because of the programme I went to have a look at Cuenca, for the first time, in, I think, 1984. The man driving the bus and the bloke in the tourist office were the people featured in the programme. It might have been 21 years before Google Maps first saw light of day but, from the dialogues in the course book about asking and giving directions, I was able to walk from the bus station to the Hostal Pilar without missing a beat.
Cuenca's relatively close to Culebrón and it's a nice town. I've just checked and we've been there 10 times in the last 20 years. You couldn't say we were regular visitors but I've still been to Cuenca more times than I have to Stoke or Bath. Cuenca has changed a lot in those two decades. The Plaza Mayor in the old town is now just for tourists and it is full of them. None of the shops there sell anything useful unless you need a fan or castanets and none of the "old men's bars" have survived. None of the artists who helped make the place famous are still alive and even the Casas Colgadas (The Hanging Houses which overlook the river ravine) seem to have been renamed in a grammatically correct fashion to become the Casas Colgantes. If you don't want to buy a donkey wearing a straw hat or drink or eat then you'll need to go to the new part of Cuenca where ordinary people live and still buy things in shops.
We've seen it all over and probably you have too; be it in Barcelona or Canterbury. On our first "pensioners holiday" in Catalunya we went on a trip to the Monastery at Montserrat. As we trogged around the place it was heaving with people but only until the coaches took all the visitors off for lunch. Montserrat reminded me of the early morning tourist throng in Karnak - everyone is herded off the boats as dawn breaks, to avoid the heat, but by midday it's completely deserted. In Zaragoza, the magnificent esplanade in front of the cathedral seethes with masses of shorts wearing, backpack toting, water swigging visitors and yet, only a street or two back, the city is still able to absorb the tourists painlessly. It's like that in lots and lots of places nowadays, in fact if you knew about the place beforehand it's more likely that it will be bubbling over with tourists than not. I'm not sure whether it's the right place at the right time or the wrong place at the wrong time. If it's a well known spot, from Prague to the Uffizi, from the Alhambra to Atrani I guarantee it will be flooded with people taking selfies. When we went on some Adriatic Cruise a couple of years ago I felt very much like one of the Mongol Hordes - despoiling Eastern Europe - as three cruise ships, ours included, dumped 9,000 passengers onto the the central streets of Kotor - population 13,500.
The Spaniards call it masificación. In Barcelona there are tourist go home posters and graffiti everywhere. Over the last couple of weeks the locals on Mallorca and the Canaries have been protesting about the invasion of tourists. Barcelona, and other cities, have changed several of the rules about tourist apartments to try to limit the numbers. Tourists are swamping the locals out.
I'm not going to get embroiled in the debate about housing prices but it's pretty obvious that the recent trend to see flats as an investment, particularly as a way to generate money from short term tourist lets, is taking flats out of the ordinary rental market. Many of those flats are being bought outright, cash on the nail as it were, by institutions with deep pockets. That must help to push up housing prices. The secondary concerns - that younger tourists are often rowdy, party well into the night, drink lots of booze, are disorderly and attract and sustain the dealers of illicit drugs - is additional to these visitors having no interest whatsoever in buying drill bits, or even bread. Their spending habits and needs mean that they change the faces of the neighbourhoods and leave the bleary eyed locals breadless and without ironmongery shops. Even the nice respectable tourists who traipse through cathedrals and museums, the ones who buy buy food in restaurants and take home traditional honey, cause crowding and queues where there were none before. And many of the jobs that tourism provides for the locals are temporary, low paying, unsociable hours type jobs which renders them useless when applying for a mortgage. Some 12% of Spain's GNP comes from tourism but there are both a lot of pros and a lot of cons to that business.
And, if anyone is keen to visit Culebrón Sergio and Blandine stand ready at Restaurante Eduardo and the bodega will be more than happy to sell on locally produced wine and oil.
