There's a gag in the series Friends where Joey instructs his friend Ross on how to tell a seductive story to a girl. It's a foolproof resource: "a few years ago I was visiting Europe with my backpack, specifically Barcelona, hiking Mount Tibidabo, where at the end of a path I found a girl bathing in a lake, crying…". I don't know if this scene caused an avalanche of tourists at the foot of the expiatory temple, but I do know that Tibidabo is one of the places many tourists want to visit without needing a guide: they absolutely want to go up, for the originality of its location and for the presence of an amusement park on a summit with views. However, as they don't intend to see any specific sunset and the space is wide enough, crowds do not occur. However, today the problem is in the Carmel bunkers.
I mention the topic of Tibidabo because it is not a prominent place in guidebooks; rather, it has a secondary character in the order of visits, but even so, the tourist impulse towards the mountain happens almost naturally. In the case of the bunker, it seems that word-of-mouth has indicated that fantastic sunsets can be contemplated and it is emphasized, above all, that it is not a tourist destination. Since it is not a "tourist" destination, it would be the opposite of what a tourist finds as soon as they land at El Prat Airport, that is, those fuchsia Moco Museum signs where they don't even know how to accent Dalí.
El Carmel would be an "alternative", "underground" destination, outside the "mainstream", with all that this often entails when we encounter music that makes it known everywhere that it is "alternative": that it ends up transforming it into a simple label while paradoxically becoming the most commercial music in the world. In such a way that we find a non-tourist destination, transformed into the most touristy of destinations, and all for a photo that has nothing (but nothing) to envy to the one you can take at Tibidabo itself, in Montjuïc or in the Glòries tower (in this case, yes, paying). Because it's not about the photo: it's about the experience. And, if it's about the experience, the fact that there are a lot of people doesn't bother. On the contrary: we are a good group of people who meet, as in Ibiza, celebrating that the sun sets in front of a Mediterranean landscape that we like. I don't think this can be avoided. I don't think it should be avoided. I don't think it's bad. Not that specific fact.
If they tell me there's a hill on the outskirts of Venice where you can contemplate the city, far from the tourist centrality, where you can feel not controlled or directed or advised, but simply trying to experience a more intimate and direct relationship between you and the city, that is, precisely without filters (#nofilters), believe me I will do it and believe me you will too. If it turns out that the invention becomes fashionable and this creates inconveniences for the neighbors, this is where the City Council can intervene with the presence of urban guards in the adjoining streets, monitoring the non-compliance with any ordinance. And we can even run a campaign asking tourists for respect, and remind them that this is a city and not a showcase, "pretend it's a city". But in no way should this make us charge an entrance fee or limit access to El Carmel, much less invite us to think about whether we have bad quality tourism, just because the bunker is free. We are making a mistake.
It seems obvious to me that, if we aim for "quality tourism," we cannot base the parameters of this "quality" on quantitative concepts: how many there are, how much they spend, whether they come on a cruise or not, how much they spend, what age they are, how much they spend, whether they come alone or with family, how much they spend. None of this has anything to do with quality. If we move away from these economicist and powerpoint parameters, which may be the work of some hoteliers and restaurateurs (only one type of hoteliers and restaurateurs) but not that of politicians, much less that of citizens or neighbors, we will see that quality is something else and that it has more to do with being mentioned in a series or being the subject of word-of-mouth for alternative routes. I don't know what else we want. Success is this, and everything else is management... or bad management, of course.