The Places That Don't Want You Anymore
There is a moment, standing in the middle of a narrow Venetian alleyway at 9am in July, when you realise that you are not a traveller. You are a problem. A local woman leans out of her window above you, not to wave or smile, but to close the shutters. You and the twelve other tourists blocking her street have made her home feel like a film set, and she has had enough.
Venice is not alone. From the sun-bleached steps of Santorini to the rice terraces of Bali, some of the most photographed places on earth are quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, asking us to stay away. Barcelona residents have taken to the streets with placards. The Canary Islands saw protests drawing tens of thousands of people. The Amalfi Coast has introduced traffic bans. These are not isolated incidents. They are a movement.
Venice is not alone. From the sun-bleached steps of Santorini to the rice terraces of Bali, some of the most photographed places on earth are quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, asking us to stay away. Barcelona residents have taken to the streets with placards. The Canary Islands saw protests drawing tens of thousands of people. The Amalfi Coast has introduced traffic bans. These are not isolated incidents. They are a movement.
The question is not whether overtourism is real. It plainly is. The question is what we do about it. The honest answer is that most of us do nothing. We book the same flights, scroll the same Instagram accounts for inspiration, and arrive at the same cobbled squares dragging the same wheeled luggage. We tell ourselves we are different from the crowds, even as we become them.
And yet there is another way to travel. Not the preachy, hair-shirt version sold by eco-lodges and carbon calculators, but something more quietly radical. Going slower. Staying longer. Choosing the town nobody has made a reel about yet. The Croatian island without a direct flight. The Portuguese village where the restaurant has no English menu and the owner brings you whatever she feels like cooking that day.
And yet there is another way to travel. Not the preachy, hair-shirt version sold by eco-lodges and carbon calculators, but something more quietly radical. Going slower. Staying longer. Choosing the town nobody has made a reel about yet. The Croatian island without a direct flight. The Portuguese village where the restaurant has no English menu and the owner brings you whatever she feels like cooking that day.
There is a generation of travellers beginning to understand that the most memorable experiences are rarely the ones you queued two hours for. They happen in the margins, in the unplanned Tuesday afternoon when the rain came in and you ended up playing cards with strangers in a bar that smelled of woodsmoke and coffee.
The places that don't want you anymore are telling us something important. They are not being rude. They are exhausted. And if we are honest with ourselves, part of us understands exactly how they feel. We have all stood somewhere impossibly beautiful and wished, just for a moment, that nobody else knew about it.
The places that don't want you anymore are telling us something important. They are not being rude. They are exhausted. And if we are honest with ourselves, part of us understands exactly how they feel. We have all stood somewhere impossibly beautiful and wished, just for a moment, that nobody else knew about it.
Perhaps the future of travel is not about going further or ticking off more. Perhaps it is about earning your place somewhere. Learning a few words of the language before you arrive. Eating where the locals eat, even when the menu makes no sense. Leaving a place in better shape than you found it, not through guilt or obligation, but because you genuinely fell in love with it and love, by its very nature, wants to protect the thing it values.
The world is not a bucket list. It is somebody else's home. It is time we started acting like guests who were actually invited.
The world is not a bucket list. It is somebody else's home. It is time we started acting like guests who were actually invited.
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