We live in an empty country and we live in an overcrowded country. We live in the most beautiful and gloomy inland Spain and we live in the coastal Spain, of sun and beach bars. While one Spain fills up, another empties.
Half of Spain is speaking Spanish, Basque, Galician, Catalan and the other half is speaking English, French, German...
When the inhabitants of Puerto del Carmen go down to buy bread in the mornings, they will hear their supermarket cashier say: -Good morning! Do you need a bag?. It doesn't matter that they are in Spain: They will listen to English music, English matches, emergency services in English, and they will be sold T-shirts with phrases in the Anglo-Saxon language.
As R. Christin says in his book "Against Tourism", we are all tourists. I am documenting myself with Marina Planas on her "Bellicose approaches to tourism; all included", the wonderful prints of Els Baluars 2020. And no. That is not the problem. Or yes, it is, excuse me. But it is within a system that has already devoured us, in which we have participated, and within the complex social and/or pseudo-development paradigm that we have already built.
We cannot reflect on tourist overcrowding and sustainable development without understanding the complex psychological, sociological, philosophical, ecological gear that underlies it.
From my position as a philosopher, I have more questions than answers. The first is: What is it to be a tourist? What does it mean to be a tourist today? Do we constantly need to be tourists? As a philosophy teacher I ask myself: Is there a relationship between the way we live and co-live? Does education have anything to do with tourism? Does the Earth, climate change, have anything to do with tourism? This last question seems the simplest, but it also hides many edges.
Talking to my friend M, I understood that in one way or another, the classics like Schiller -those dusty ones that are already found on the shelves of antique dealers- gave the key to many of our problems. In his "Letters on the aesthetic education of man" (1795), Schiller proposes that sentimental education. A sentimental education that may not be that forgotten "education to citizenship", but does provide the man's gaze towards nature and the pure. A purity mixed with naivety that Schiller will also cite against "artifice".
If we go further, we can understand what it means to "sensitize". Beware, not to "indoctrinate".
If we reflect one step further, we can listen to Jesús Mosterín or Aranguren shouting, but also, without a doubt, to César Manrique on our island. No. He was not a philosopher. Or maybe yes? We all are in one way or another.
And like Schiller, perhaps a first point, or fine thread of the enormous spider web where we find ourselves, is ultimately about coexistence and sensitivity.