Identity and Tourism

Tourism is becoming increasingly diverse and controversial and has transformed many aspects of life. To this very day it influences what we see in the landscape, in cities, on what we think about them, but tourism has generated far-reaching changes even on the physical level. It is very interesting to see the roots of tourism, as a cultural phenomenon, in the Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment. With the end of agricultural societies, the middle class expanded and gained more free time, the condition for modern tourism. The railways and other modern methods of transport offered increasingly faster and comfortable ways to get to places for ever-larger numbers of people. In addition to bringing about modernization and development, the industrial regions and smoky industrial towns lowered the quality of life and alienated their residents from nature. However, it was not only the thermal spas and spa towns that offered people a remedy, but also the new philosophical trends, especially the trend of romanticism, stemming from the bases of Enlightenment. The romantic artistic trends, poetry and landscape painting overthrew the idea of wild nature, and through its glorification these trends created a longing for being in or returning to nature. In parallel with this the concept of the modern (nation)-state appreciated the importance of practices that created and reinforced identity. In turn, there were two main sources of regional or national identity: the one was architectural, urban culture, on the basis of which the Grand Tour, the tradition of young western European aristocrats visiting a “bucket list” of cities was established in the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries. At times even the capital city of the Monarchy, Vienna, had belonged to this list of decorated cities. The other source became nature, and so in this region the emblematic mountain ranges, the Alps and the Carpathians, became the main objects of identification. This is not just about urban and monument protection, and how the nature protection movement was born, leading to the listing of monuments and protected species and the designation of national parks, but also how tourism came into being. ¹