Decadent Catania, Wild Crete: How Mass Tourism Creates Hidden Worlds

How Mass Tourism Creates Hidden Worlds

Scene 1. Catania

From my hostel room in Catania, Italy I have the best view of Etna. Now and then I’d get up from bed to check if the volcano was exploding and about to kill us, but no. So far, so good.

On arrival to Ostello Degli Elefanti, I spotted good news and bad.

The good news: the hostel’s enormous common area with genuine seventeenth-century frescoes on the ceilings. The bad news: we were right over the main shopping street of Catania. I dreaded being trapped in the tourist zone. But in the end, it turned out well.

The first person I met was Ellen from Ghana, hostel staff cleaning my room because I’d arrived early. We talked and I listened to her story. She had come by boat with her daughter two years ago.

Meeting her paid off. I had torn a pant leg and asked if she knew a tailor. She sent me to a street market where I found Imran, from Bangladesh, sewing right on the street. He had a mountain of work but fixed mine right away, asking for two euros.

Coming back, meandering among bored tourists, I wandered randomly through an inviting open gate. It turned out to be a university (perhaps a tourist attraction, perhaps not. I don’t know. As a rule, I do not read guide books). Once inside, I started wondering whether the university had a library where I could work.

Two workers on a ladder doing some renovation told me there was indeed a library upstairs, and the guardian let me in. It was beautiful and almost empty, perhaps because nobody had announced it in guidebooks which I had not read? There was no sign post on the door either. I worked there for two quiet hours next to a lonely student.

That evening, on the balcony, I checked Etna again… still calm. Good. Ellen and a colleague were smoking next door and waved. Soon more people came and a wonderful party team formed: Gerar from Venezuela, Lisa from Germany, Aziz from Oman, Stanley from the UK and I. We went out to drink wine on a square.

Lisa and Gerar

So ended my first day, without doing a single tourist thing. I was satisfied, but not fulfilled. Somewhere there had to be another Catania, buzzing and real.

Scene 2: Real Catania

The next day, while the party team went to the beach, I returned to the library and later followed them on a bearing (without Google Maps), determined to get lost. This worked - I did get lost quite fast. In just three minutes’ walk from the hostel, I found the city I was looking for. Every corner begged for a photo. Soon I reached the beach. On the way back, I convinced the group to return by my route, with a contest for The Decadent Picture Of The Day.

Challenge was accepted and submissions included:

Image 1: Defunct theme park

Image 2: Dog guarding abandoned restaurant (looks scary, but it was a very nice dog)

Image 3: Neighbor’s street party on office chairs

Image 4: Two men transporting a door on a supermarket cart

Image 5: Two Muslim girls and cathedral

I suggested we eat at Macelleria Tondicello for five euros, but the vegetarians resisted. Soon, back in the tourist zone we’d pay twenty-five for the same meal. Comfort zones are expensive.

That night I stayed in the hostel, talking with newly arrived Chilean travelers on the balcony and keeping watch over Etna, since someone had to. Thanks to my vigil, the volcano stayed quiet and did not kill us.

The next morning I would leave for Greece.

Two days survived in the tourist heart of Catania, and I never once saw the city’s “attractions.” Oddly enough, the stay shifted my view on mass tourism. I used to loathe it. Now I’m starting to think it saves places rather than destroys them. To explain what I mean, here’s the third scene, two days later.

Scene 3. Paradise Beach

Two days later I was in Crete, Greece. From Heraklio airport, my son and I drove past rows of hotels and Airbnbs. We didn’t stop, except to buy water and camping gas -hearing Russian, Italian, and Polish voices everywhere. After an hour, the hotels became rarer. Soon, even the local homes disappeared. We drove past rocks and trees. Then, only fifteen minutes from Elafonisi, the island’s most famous beach, we found something worth stopping: a paradise beach.

Enormous, windswept, and completely empty.

We pitched a tent near a lonely restaurant with four customers and twenty empty tables. Soon, a shepherd with wild white hair, arrived to greet us and milk his goats. His name was Ian.

That night we slept to the lull of the waves and the wind. It was hard to believe a place like this could exist on Crete, a target for hordes of tourists, mid-season. Yet, we were alone and remained alone for three days.

The next afternoon I walked to the restaurant to do some writing. I was the only guest - or so I thought - until I saw Ian, sitting alone at a table by the sea.

I joined him and after some chat I offered him wine, which he accepted. So I went to the counter, where I asked the lady for a pitcher and two glasses. “What, for my husband?” she said, surprised.

That’s how I realized Ian the shepherd was also Ian the restaurant owner.

“Okay… but one glass is enough,” she added.

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By the fourth glass, I asked him why the paradise beach was so deserted. Where were all the people?

“Maybe they are afraid of the wind?” he said, after a long pause. Then, after another pause: “It’s always been like this. People don’t want to come where there’s no other people.”

Ian the shepherd and Ian the restaurant owner

Rethinking Mass Tourism

So is mass tourism bad?

For a long time I thought so. Now I think quite the contrary.

Mass tourism is the opposite process of gentrification. Gentrification (lately accelerated by Airbnb) turns entire cities into hotels, sucks all their juice, turns them into plastic theme parks, and kills them.

Mass tourism work in the exact opposite way. It concentrates strangers in one zone - hotels, main squares, famous beaches… and leaves the rest untouched.

Thanks to mass tourism, the authentic Catania begins just two blocks from tourist Catania. The invisible line between locals and visitors is sharp. Places like Macelleria Tondicello remain for locals.

Thanks to mass tourism, that Cretan beach (which I won’t name, but you will find with some effort), stays empty. The sand remains for the goats. Everyone else is at Elafonisi.

And that, unexpectedly, is the gift of mass tourism: by crowding together, it keeps the world’s edges wild.

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The Crete journey continues here.