Tourism as an Agent of Economic Transformation in Southern Europe

Tourism has struggled to achieve respectability among academic researchers. Nuñez (1978, p. 207), for example, writes of the scorn and suspicion that results from taking seriously such a ‘frivolous’ topic. Equally, state interventionism in tourism has been minimalist, being restricted to general land use planning, international marketing, and registration/supervision of the standards of facilities. There are minor exceptions, such as the influential role of state subsidies in the 1960s hotel construction boom in the Algarve, and the devalorization (see Lipietz, 1980) of state capital in the construction of airports, motorways and water treatment. However, these are insignificant compared to the major interventionist role of the Southern European states in manufacturing and agriculture (for example, see Williams, 1989). In general, the economic transformation strategies of these states have been notable for their almost total reliance on manufacturing as ‘the motor of development’. The classic case is the strategy for the Mezzogiorno, which largely neglected tourism until the 1970s. Barucci and Becheri (1990, p. 227) note that only ‘when industrial economies seemed to be in a crisis … it was natural to wonder what the touristic destiny of the South might be’. The same comment could be applied almost equally well to the south of Europe as a whole.