I first travelled abroad in my early teens on a day trip across the Channel to France with my father. As we walked away from the dock, I recall my father saying, “Let’s get into the backstreets.” And so we did. I don’t remember much about that experience. Fast forward to 1973, when a friend and I were wild camping in the north of Scotland. We walked down the lane to a local bar. As we entered, the bar fell silent. Nothing was said, but it was clear that we were unwelcome and would not be served. We quietly retreated.
I used this example when I was teaching the social anthropology of tourism at Greenwich University. One of my students recounted how she and her husband had driven a few minutes down the road to their local town for lunch. Finding all the restaurants, cafés and bars on the main street full, they walked 100 metres up a side street. As they entered the bar, it fell silent. They realised that they too were unwelcome, would not be served and left.
There are more extreme cases of the same phenomenon. Social anthropologists describe the difference between the public “front stage” and the more private “backstage”, culturally private rather than necessarily legally private. There had been growing disquiet about overtourism for a while before an incident in the fishers’ neighbourhood of La Barceloneta sparked demonstrations and overtourism became a prominent political issue in Barcelona.
“Here tourists do whatever they want,” Vicens Forner told El País. A local photographer, he was the one snapping photos of the Italian tourists as they wandered his neighbourhood for three hours in the nude, even popping into a local shop, while horrified residents looked on.
Fifty years ago, Doxey published his Irritation Index, the Irridex, which recognised that local residents often initially experience euphoria at living in a place worthy of visiting, followed by apathy, annoyance and then antagonism. Of course, local people will move along the Irridex curve at different rates, but as the current issues around overtourism have demonstrated, the negative impacts can be cumulative.
We talk about mass tourism in the same way that we talk about traffic. The “mass” and “traffic” are, of course, other people. We forget that we are as much part of the traffic and the mass as all the others on the motorway or in the Louvre. The tourists and the locals are heterogeneous, and our antagonism is caused, in part, by the behaviour of tourists and day excursionists. As part of tackling overtourism, local authorities are increasingly seeking to regulate visitor behaviour and encourage visitors to show respect for the place and its people, in other words, to behave as guests.
Spreading tourism can spread the problem
One response to overtourism has been to spread tourists temporally or spatially. The downside of this approach is that you may simply expand the area impacted by overtourism and visitors invade the “backstage” and deny locals an “off season”, an often vital breathing space for a more normal life.
Tiny Tourism is emerging as an alternative way to travel described by Laura Hall as the “counter-trend snubs overcrowded hotspots and “bucket lists” in favour of seeking out small, hyper-local experiences. The principle boils down to one little rule: if it feels like a tourist would do it, don’t.”
Two problems arise. First this is most likely an additional activity if you are in Barcelona you are still likely to visit the Sagrada Familia to get your trophy selfie. Worse you will want your selfie in the supermarket. If you don’t recognize the issue ask Mrs Google for a “selfie in the supermarket.”
I, for one, don’t want visitors lining up their “perfect shot” while I am shopping and I don’t want to see tourists invading the privacy of my neighbours poking their cameras into their windows. Some Bibury residents claim that “… oblivious pic hunters have also knocked down walls in their cars, blocked their driveways and several of the endless stream of coaches even run people over.” In August last year, The Sun carried a series of photographs with a report about this invasion of the backstage.
‘Tiny Tourism’ is no antidote to mass tourism, rather it spreads the impact backstage likely increasing irritation and antagonism.
What if we returned instead?
There is an alternative. I am a repeat visitor to Ludlow for the Food and Drink Festival. We have been every year but five over the last twenty-five years. We now ‘know’ people there; we have become temporary residents.
Annabel Grossman has written about her repeat visits to a corner of Wales, where she has travelled 35 times. Despite Pembrokeshire being relatively close to her home in London, she returns to do much the same things each time: swimming at the same beach, running the same coastal paths, visiting the same coves, climbing the same mountain, eating at the same pubs and kayaking along the same stretch of coastline. For her, this familiarity and repetition have become a form of rest and relaxation.
As Jeff Bogle writes, this is a trend “According to Priceline’s 2026 Where to Next? report, 73% of travellers surveyed said that they are drawn back to the places and experiences that shaped them, from family beaches to amusement parks. Hilton’s latest global travel report echoes the trend: 58% of travellers with children plan to revisit destinations from their own childhood, while 52% of Brazilian travellers return to the same destinations year after year.”
Perhaps there is something important here for the overtourism debate. Rather than constantly seeking somewhere new and pushing tourism further into the “backstage”, there is value in returning to places we already know. We may become repeat visitors or even temporary residents, but we remain guests, and good guests respect the places where people live.
