ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the material factors that have enabled and promoted tourism-related expectations and activities, thus incorporating materiality into the cultural account. It acknowledges the way humans transform the world around them through their actions, and thus the co-creation of the material world and tourism culture in the Costa del Sol through transformation and performance. The chapter examines the complex material cultures that are woven into the everyday lives of British residents in Spain. It demonstrates that how complex material culture is the very contradiction between residence and tourism that enables residential tourists to live life as a kind of escape. The chapter considers the dynamic relationship between people and things, and the ways in which people actively and bodily involve themselves in the material world. It also considers residential tourism not as a state but as a continual performance, a balancing act of here and there, utopia and reality, tourism and arriving.
