ABSTRACT
In continental Europe, the genesis of modern mass tourism occurred in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Significantly, travel writing boomed at exactly the same time, from individual accounts and diaries to commercially available guidebooks. Travel produced a mass of writing, which invites us to view travel in terms of both cultural practices and textual representations. Travellers took notes as they travelled, jotting down new sights and sensations which they would later try to recall in the form of a more considered and reflective literary text. In the Pyrenees, the tourist gaze had multiple faces but in the case of the Pyrenean spa resorts, mass tourism was prompted by reasons of health. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment discovered the Pyrenees. Scientists and surveyors travelled across the mountains to measure the height of the peaks and to collect scientific information.
