ABSTRACT
A tourist sight may be defined as a spatial location which is distinguished from everyday life by virtue of its natural, historical or cultural extraordinariness. Urry (1990:11) argues that tourist sights are predicated in a binary opposition between the ordinary/everyday and the extraordinary. This opposition is culturally constructed. In Western culture a number of spatial locations and objects exist which signify extraordinary qualities and seem to command us to visit them at least once in our lifetime: the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon, Sydney Harbour, Niagara Falls and the Statue of Liberty are all good examples. More generally the urge to travel to witness the ‘extraordinary’ or the ‘wonderful’ object seems to be a deep urge in all human cultures.
