Tourism, modernization, and difference: A twentieth-century Spanish paradigm

This essay explores the role of tourism in Spanish cultural and political history in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although Spain developed modern domestic leisure practices in the nineteenth century, tourism promoters were dismayed by the small numbers of foreign visitors they received. By the early twentieth century, the project of developing a receptive tourism industry became a major component of a broader modernization programme. The economic potential was clear, but tourism's political value did not end there. Successive Spanish governments regarded the tourism industry as an auxiliary to conventional diplomacy, hoping to present their oft-maligned country as modern and hospitable and to stimulate the development of a modern leisure infrastructure suited to cosmopolitan tastes. After 1945, when Franco's right-wing dictatorship faced international ostracism, foreign tourism became an important form of international relations. In the subsequent three decades, tourism became arguably the Franco regime's most important political and economic good until problems of overbuilding and corruption ended the euphoria of Spain's so-called 'tourist miracle'.