I'll set the scene for you: Thursday, eleven in the morning. The center of Arrecife dawns with that human tide disembarking from the cruise ships and occupying everything: sidewalks, terraces, shop windows, even the air. In a popular café, while I try to answer WhatsApp messages and have a coffee, two ladies at the next table are talking loudly enough for no one to avoid hearing them. They complain about the umpteenth invasion, the hustle and bustle, the noise, that feeling of living in a set for others. And, suddenly, one of them, with a forceful certainty, as if writing a maxim for posterity, dictating sentence and laying down the law, lets it slip:
—Going sightseeing is vulgar. —You are absolutely right.And as there is nothing more to say about it, both get up hastily, leave, as in the movies, the exact amount of money on the table and leave, dodging as best they can the river of cruise passengers that continues to advance without looking at anyone
The phrase is provocative, uncomfortable, and yet, it contains a critique that is worth observing without becoming defensive. We live in a time when "traveling" has become an act of fast consumption, a stamp on the emotional passport that is collected to prove something to others. What once implied curiosity, learning, or even risk, today appears diluted in a global choreography of identical selfies, prefabricated routes, and destinations turned into theme parks, a drift that Michel Houellebecq already acidly caricatured in Lanzarote, where the island becomes the perfect stage to showcase the emptiness, repetition, and banality of modern tourism.
Calling this "tourism" is almost a courtesy. In many places, it's no longer a visit: it's a soft, constant, and uncritical invasion. Traveling has become commonplace because it no longer requires sensitivity, context, or respect. All it takes is paying for a cheap flight, following an algorithmic map, and letting yourself be swept along by the crowd to the same oversaturated spots. Deep experience is replaced by simulation; the gaze flattens, and the visitor no longer wonders what the place means, what stories sustained it, or what fragilities run through it
Tourism as an industrialized practice not only degrades landscapes and neighborhoods: it also degrades the idea of travel. Where there was once encounter, there is now spectacle. Where there was once listening, there is now noise. Where there was once relationship, there is now only use. The visitor does not look: they capture. They do not converse: they demand. They do not linger: they consume.
But vulgarity lies not in moving through the world, but in doing so without intention, without care, and without ethical consideration. Contemporary mobility is an immense privilege that demands a response of responsibility. Travel could remain a way to understand and transform oneself, but to achieve that, we need to recover something that mass tourism has expelled: humility. Humility to understand that one arrives late to all places, that nothing is there to please us, and that no destination exists to serve as a backdrop for our digital livesTourism is a vulgarity when it turns the traveler into a customer and the world into a backdrop. Traveling, on the other hand, remains one of the noblest gestures if practiced with the slowness, listening, and awareness that allow for true observation
