Roundabout
Counting the Spoilers
By KATHARINE WHITEHORN
ir is an odd thing about tourism. It represents the best possible urge on the part of almost every- body, and yet its effects are almost uniformly disastrous. The summer being now over, the places that the tourist hath eaten are gradually returning to their winter this year will be overrun beyond recognition by next. However, it should be possible to work out just which half.
It is, you might say, a branch of social phy- sics: that dubious science which contends that the laws of matter can be applied to towns and villages if one is supplied with enough data about them. You calculate the 'weight' of a town, as it were, by counting the telegraph poles, the width of the streets and the smoke in the air, and then proceed by the laws of ordinary physics. In calculating the spoliation rate of tourist spots, you need to know three things: the height off the ground of the beauty that has caused the spot to be spotted, the profession of the first visitors from outside and the actual numerical size of the (original) community.
There are two kinds of attraction whose dis- appearance may cause us to say a place is spoiled. There is the attraction of natural scenery; untrod sands, mountain slopes without a house in sight, heather moors. And there is the rather more subtle attraction of natural human beings : simple fisher folk mending their simple nets, shepherds in real plaids, actual peasants at their spinning wheels. Either type is comparatively easy to get on its own : you only have to avoid sea and ski (presumably in the eighteenth century you would have had to keep clear of Healthful Springs).
My family, keenly picnicking half-way up Braeriach in the rain, were always disgusted if they saw anyone else in the course of the day; discussion would break out as to whether, five miles from the nearest road, the other party could fairly be despised as trippers. Great riches or a National Park can easily seal off a slab of vegetable nature and keep it intact. And, similarly, there is no problem about finding human nature unsullied by tourism at, say, an industrial railway junction. But the image of ourselves leading the natural life, which is what causes people to seek unspoiled places, unfor- tunately requires a mixture of both attractions.
And no place is unspoilable, since the basic idea is contradictory: go and stay in an unspoiled society and you are not a jolly shepherd, you are the first despoiler. After that it is simply a question of the rate.
But back to our equation. First, assess the height off the ground. This is a matter of having something nice to look at that is taller than the trippers, and in ' some cases the buildings as well; it also involves the point that it is easier to build large hotels along fiat, sandy shores than clinging to cliffs, and the trees are less likely to get cut down to make room for villas in places where the yobboes suspect that the trees are the only things holding the cliffs together. This is why the COte d'Azur, generally considered to have been ruined for about fifteen years, will never get as bad as Florida nor spoil as fast as any Bahaman beach—simply because the hills run steeply down to the sea. The Carmargue, which is alleged to be the next place to go, will be ruined in a couple of years: it is flat. (Even the height rule has its exceptions, though. Many is the poet who has bitterly remarked that he lifted up his eyes unto the hills whence comes a helicopter advertising Sure.) The spoliation rate of the normal resident population is largely dependent on just who originally discovers the place. There is a mount- ing scale in this from the time when nobody in the village speaks English, through the turning- point at which more of the villagers work at tourism more of the time than they work at any- thing else, up to the crisis where you no longer wear things that blend with the people who live there, but with the other summer visitors. However, places discovered by certain types of people—mountaineers, anglers and archaeolo- gists (and even, to a lesser extent, by people who come to see what the archwologists have dug up)—spoil slowly. This is partly because they (the visitors) are relatively poor and require no home comforts, so no one is tempted to give up mending nets in order to sell them bars of choco- late; it is rather more because they come for fish, cliffs, buried rocks or buildings in which the local life takes no interest, and not for the local life itself. So there is no pressure on the naïve fisher folk (naïve? HO to clump about singing sea shanties or wearing sombreros in- doors. Greece has been perfect in this respect for a long time : nobody has taken to standing around looking like a Delphic charioteer just to please the tourists.
However, failing these classes of people, it is seriously better to try somewhere which is busy being spoiled by intellectuals. As Marghanita Laski has pointed out, the intellectuals who most deplore the existence of houses without drains in Britain are the ones who, seek them most keenly abroad. They, and the smart people who ape them, leave the buildings alone to an extent that the more simple-minded colonisers do not. St. Tropez may be the Nassau of the Cote d'Azur, but it still looks nice from a distance, it still has a magnificent view, and the crumbling houses contain rich boutiques instead of brand- new stores to sell plastic bathing shoes.
The numerical strength of the original popu- lation is also, to some extent, its strength to resist spoliation. One thing that continually makes a tourist cross is the discovery that the village he discovered has become a town. l'his is unreason- able, not only because it is in the nature of any normal village to seek its own aggrandisement, but because, contrary to general belief, towns spoil slower than villages. This is also partly a matter of verticals—look at Venice, look at the Empire State Building—but it is more be- cause the crucial point where the waiters out- number the workers is less likely to be reached.
Of course, there are other factors that come into it: a place may have a degree of natural protection, such as being impassable to roads (like the Cinque Terre) or having vile weather (Scotland) or a season so short that the local people have ten months of the year to revert to ordinary work (Lapland). But by and large, if you want a place that isn't going to go off like mincemeat come the hot weather, choose a good- sized village on a forty-five-degree slope that is visited, in this order, by goatherds, mountaineers, railway tracklayers, writers, film stars and only finally by Jaguars and coach tours. And if you find one, don't try to pay for your holiday by writing about it.
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