The territorial limitation of islands makes them more aware of the limits of their resources in the face of tourist overexploitation. In the critical bibliography, however, two almost opposing trends can be identified: those who detect the risks of tourist overexploitation of islands, and those who identify tourism as a possibility for development that insularity could hinder for other tourism industries. The concept of ‘resilience’ is often discussed as a specific virtue that would enable tourism to support the social and ecological footprint more than other environments and diversify the knowledge needed to sustain itself with its own resources (McLeod; Dodds, Butler 2021). The need to “support” this footprint, even when it threatens the social, ecological and cultural balance of the environment, is related to the possibility of “development” of environments that have not been able, by their peripheral or remote condition, to become industrialised. According to Dimitrios Buhalis (1999), tourism would reduce the prosperity gap between developed and underdeveloped countries. This decrease may have as a counterpoint, he also admits, inequality in access to the capital generated by tourism when the majority of residents participate only in the wealth of tourism from precarious jobs, their own or, in general, conditioned by the multinationals that influence tourism demand, access to the island and even – if the political power allows it – its planning and accessibility. Somewhat more nuanced and critical views are those who consider the fragility of many island ecosystems subjected to a great exhaustion of resources – for example, water – due to the massive arrival of visitors. In considering the impact of climate change on island tourism environments, starting from the particular case of Malta and Mallorca (Calvià), Rachel Dodds and Ilan Kelman (2018) propose different action plans needed to protect environments to make them safe for tourism, but without questioning how tourism, in fact, also contributes to climate change and the natural degradation of many of the environments in which it occurs. Sustainability is thus defined not only as a necessity of tourism in relation to the territory in which it operates, but as a strategy which allows adaptation to changes caused, among other factors, by tourism itself.

Mercè Picornell

References:

Buhalis, Dimitrios (1999). “Tourism in the Greek Islands: The issues of peripherality, competitiveness and development”, International Journal of Tourism Research, 1(5), 341-359.

Dodds, Rachel, i Kelman, Ilan (2008). “How climate change is considered in sustainable tourism policies: A case of the Mediterraneal Islands of Malta and Mallorca”, Tourism Review International, 12, 57-70.

NcLeod, Michelle, Dodds, Rachel, and Butler, Richard (2021). “Introduction to special issue on island tourism resilience”, Tourism Geographies, 23: 3, 361-370.

Whether in the absence or stereotypical representation of the resident, or in the identification of the island with its ideal, the foreign gaze and control over representation have their mark. The island element, according to Adam Grydehøj, Yaso Nadarajah and Ulunnguaq Markussen (2020), played a role in the construction of colonial and neocolonial spheres of power. Moreover, we are not talking about a purely imaginary location here – like, for instance, the island of Caliban, whether in William Shakespeare or Aimé Césaire – but about a particular dependency that, according to Yolanda Martínez (2018), remains operational. One could even identify a historical trend in the use of some so-called ‘overseas’ territories as a laboratory or model in the assimilation of other island regions or, we would even say, other continents. Concepts used to refer to islands far from their metropolises such as “overseas territories” or “outermost regions”, used in the European framework, already denote the complex link between insularity and colonialism. Some researchers have projected this link to the constitution of the insular element as a tourist destination, especially when this insularity is linked to geostrategically more “southern” territories of European countries with continental capitals that were “their” metropolises. Helen Kapstein (2017) identifies in this ability to generate “other places” a particular origin, linked to the constitutive imaginary of European nations.

Carla Guerrón (2011) studied the tourist use of the concept of “island paradise” derived from the projection of conceptions such as the “discovery” of islands, even when they are inhabited, and the representations of the colonizers survive in current representations. Thus, for example, although the Caribbean islands are among the most socially and ethnically heterogeneous in popular culture, they are reproduced as simplified and uniform versions, marked by exoticism and exuberance. On the island, time seems to stand still. Islands, Kapstein writes, function as a particular microcosm on which the nation can project its stereotypes. In this sense, Anthony Soares writes that “Today, in a supposedly postcolonial context, islands offer perhaps the most potent, distressing and anomalous images of the neocolonial project, and can therefore be seen as examples of the complex afterlives of empire” (2017: xvi ). In the world of global capitalism, the simplicity of the identification between insularity and colony is challenged by the capacity of islands themselves to generate hierarchical power dynamics (emblematically, in the headquarters of large hotel groups, based in the Balearic Islands and extending their dynamics in the Caribbean). The fact remains, however, that a certain colonial imaginary survives in the representation of the islands, that is, in their audio-visual representation, in the identification of the resident as the servant of the visitor, in the national hierarchies that are imposed in the very dynamics of tourist hospitality. Tina Jamieson, for example, studied it in the permanence of the idea of exoticism that is maintained in the use of certain Pacific islands as wedding venues for tourists who usually come from the former metropolises (Hampton; Jeyacheya 2014). Louis Turner and John Ash (1975) had been writing that tourism, from its beginnings in the nineteenth century, became an agent of “empire” consolidation. It would be worth assessing how late capitalism varies this “imperialist” perception into forms of geostrategic domination or exploitation of natural resources, which no longer respond to the centre-metropolis versus periphery dialectic. This link between colonial ideology and the mythified image of the island would justify, for some, a certain specificity in the development of tourism in island enclaves. The recurrence of island segmentation in tourism promotion, which coexists, of course, with other segmentations equally determined by more or less colonial imaginaries – the desert, the Orient, the indigenous, the wild Nordic landscape, the ‘historical’ cities – seems to accompany this idea which, however, has been questioned.

Mercè Picornell

References:

Grydehøj, Adam; Nadarajah, Yaso; Markussen, Ulunnguaq (2018). “Islands of indigeneity: Cultural Disctinction, Indigenous Territory and Island Spaciality”. Area, 52(1): 14-22.

Guerrón Montero, Carla (2011). “On Tourism and the Constructions of ‘Paradise islands’ in Central America and the Caribbean”. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 30: 1. 21-34.

Kapstein, Helen (2017). Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism. Londres i Nova York: Rowman i Littlefield International.

Martínez, Yolanda (2018). “Colonialismo y decolonialidad archipelágica en el Caribe”. Tabula Rasa: revista de humanidades, 29. 37-64.

Turner, Louis; Ash, John (1975). The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery. Nova York: St. Martin’s Press.

In the configuration of the tourist image of most island destinations, their mythical condition is fundamental. The fanciful echoes of their names or nicknames for islands cross the boundary between reality and fiction, from Ulysses’ Ithaca to the Fortunate Islands that some have wanted to locate in Macaronesia. In literature, islands refer to a place of refuge or a remote, natural, uninhabited space, even when – as in The Tempest or Robinson Crusoe – it is actually inhabited. The fantasy of the insular creates a fascination linked to the idea of otherness, distance or separation (Sharpley 2012). The insular myth has resulted in a falsification or simplification of the meaning of the word ‘island’ itself, which would refer, according to Charles C. Lim and Chris Cooper (2008), to an idea of fantasy, escape from routine and normality. This is the topic that portrays the island as a small, tropical territory (Baldacchino 2008), ignoring the diversity of island territories that do not fit into the category. According to David Harrison (2001) this ambivalence still prevails in contemporary representations, in which the island is presented as an escape from the everyday frenzy and a distant and inhospitable place. It is also used in advertising as a claim for products as varied as shampoos, colognes or soft drinks. John Gillis (2007: 274) places islands among the “mythical geographies” of Western culture, where they are associated with remoteness, difference and exoticism. The metaphorical idea of the insular – explains Pete Hay (2006: 30) – can even make it difficult for us to remember the reality of islands, and their diversity. The mythical impulse of the insular seems to irreversibly guide the tourist conceptualization of island enclaves, and conditions the tourist’s gaze which, according to John Urry, conditions not only the tourist’s expectations, but can even modify the landscape, that is, adapt it to what the myth sells, exaggerating, for example, what in the Canaries can resemble the Tropical or creating a green locus amoenus (pleasant place) ofgrass planted on the golf courses of Mediterranean islands threatened by the lack of rain for much of the summer.

Mercè Picornell

References:

Baldacchino, Godfrey (2008). “Studying Islands: On Whose Terms? Some Epistemological and Methodological Challenges to the Pursuit of Island Studies”. Island Studies Journal, 3: 1. 37-56.

Gillis, John (2004). Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination created the Atlantic World. Nova York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hall, M. C. (2012). “Island, islandness, vulnerability and resilience”. Tourism Recreation Research, 37(2), 177-181.

Harrison, David, “Islands, Image and Tourism”, Tourism Recreation Research, 26(3), 9-14.

Lim, Charles C. (2008). “Beyond sustainability: optimising island tourism development”. International Journal of Tourism Research, 11: 1, 89-103.

There are many islands that project themselves globally as tourist destinations and are mostly known as such. This projection is often independent of that of the continent to which they are usually symbolically linked, or of their particular administrative condition (i.e. whether or not they are island states). Thus, those who visit Hawaii do not do so as a stopover on their route through the United States, and the insular character of Malta or Cyprus certainly overlooks their statehood. Although there are specific studies on tourism on so-called “cold” islands, the critical bibliography on island tourism mostly refers to small islands in warm environments (warm water islands) that can be promoted as sun and beach destinations.

This identification has not prevented critical reflection on the existence of a specificity in the characterisation of tourism in island environments. For some authors, this seems more influenced by the island myth than by the possibility of isolating specific features of the tourism that develops in island environments in comparison with other localities. R. Sharpley (2012), for example, questions whether islands are popular destinations because of their geographical condition or because the services they offer are more frequent on islands. According to this author, the processes that affect tourism in island contexts – connectivity, migration, contact with other realities – are not specific and suggest that the tourist singularity of islands would be more metaphorical than unreal.

Other authors, however, turn to the socio-environmental factors of tourism areas to identify the particularities that should be considered in the analysis of their  development. These have to do, mostly, with two fundamental factors. The first would be the vulnerability, especially of ecosystems, limited in their own geographical delimitation and which, in view of the increase in population and services that tourism entails, could result in an overexploitation of natural resources (McLeod; Dodds and Butler, 2021; Hall 2015; Oreja 2008). Therefore, there is an extensive critical bibliography that tries to identify resilience or optimisation formulas that could guarantee more sustainable tourism operations. D.B. Weaver (2017) identifies a “virtuous periphery syndrome” resulting from both necessity and legacy, which transforms small islands into places of resilience and innovation. Second, especially on small islands with no industrial development prior to tourism operations, tourism has replaced an agricultural or subsistence economy that is difficult to maintain in the age of globalisation. Weaver considers tourism a suitable formula for economic development, where the apparently negative features of island contexts would be transformed into positive ones by the tourism industry. This monoculture, however, is often considered a form of dependency that may even be reminiscent of imperialism and that makes island economies and populations dependent on factors that their inhabitants and their governments cannot control. That´s what happened, for example, with the Covid-19 pandemic and the need that was raised to establish action plans in the face of climate change that would heavily threaten island enclaves. Not all inhabitants, notes Buhalis (1999), share in the wealth associated with tourism development; on the contrary, most locals are involved only in secondary, low-skilled and low-paid jobs. Even more so when the capital is accumulated by the large corporations and leisure multinationals. Finally, it should be considered that Baum (1996) and Baldacchino (2013) refer to another relevant factor in the specificity of island enclaves as tourist destinations and which relates to a certain perception of wholeness that would allow to have the perception of being visiting “a” reality. Thus, for example, it seems more feasible to visit Madagascar than France or Thailand, despite being smaller in area. In fact, this same feeling favours the creation of tourist “brands” more easily than in continental destinations, where, however, it also occurs.

Mercè Picornell

References:

Baldacchino, G., 2013. Island tourism. In: Holden, A., Fennell, D. (Eds.), A Handbook of Tourism and the Environment. Routledge,. London, pp. 200–208.

Baum, T. G. 1996. “The Fascination of Islands: The Tourist Perspective”, D. G. Lockhart i D.Drakakis-Smith, eds. Island Tourism: Problems and Perspectives. Londres: Pinter, 21-35.

Buhalis, Dimitrios (1999). “Tourism on the Greek Islands: Issues of Peripherality, Competitiveness and Development”, International Journal of Tourism Research, 1(5). 341-358.

Hall, M. C. (2012). “Island, islandness, vulnerability and resilience”. Tourism Recreation Research, 37(2), 177-181.

McLeod, Michelle; Dodds, Rachel i Richard Butler (2021). “Introduction to special issue on island tourism resilience”, Tourism Geographies, 23(3), 361-370.

Oreja Rodríguez, J. R. Et al (2008). “The sustainability of island destinations: Tourism area life cycle and teleological perspectives. The case of Tenerife”. Tourism Management, 29(1). 53-64.

Sharpley, R. 2012. “Island tourism or tourism on islands?”, Tourism Recreation Research, 37(2), 167-172.

Weaver, D. B. 2017. “Core-periphery relationships and the sustainability paradox of small island tourism”. Tourism Recreation Research, 42(1), 11-21.