Anyone who has ever traveled to visit the settings where a particular novel takes place knows very well that there is no more rewarding tourism than literary tourism. The Culture section confirms today the rise of this type of visits inspired by good literature. Planning a vacation based on a reading, or a reading based on a vacation, generates double satisfaction, especially when the chosen destinations have withstood the passage of time without suffering major urban attacks.
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Mann or Brodsky’s Venice; Byron or Mary Shelley’s Genoa; Joyce’s Dublin; Stevenson’s Edinburgh or Proust’s Normandy are examples of places where the pages that inspired them can still be evoked without having to make a great exercise of imagination.
Cities with a rich literary heritage usually take advantage of this circumstance. That is, they attract a type of cultural tourism that, by definition, is more respectful of the destination it visits than those who only seek sun and low prices. Among other advantages, literary tourism decentralizes the flow of visitors much more than monumental tourism.
The neighborhoods of Raval, Carmel, Guinardó, Gràcia or Sarrià, where very relevant passages of literature take place, are much more interesting for book tourism than the Sagrada Família itself. For someone who has enjoyed La plaça del Diamant in any of the more than 40 languages into which it has been translated, there can be no greater literary feast than rereading a chapter in the same square that inspired Mercè Rodoreda.
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It is a pity that Barcelona still lacks a museum that exhibits the story of that prodigious literature generated by native, assimilated, and transient authors. This is something that could – should – be resolved when the great public library next to Estació de França is built.
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Literary tourism also does not need infrastructure. At most, some plaques to guide the most lost. But anything that dignifies the landscape helps improve the experience. Readers who follow the steps of Sagarra, Vázquez Montalbán or Ruiz Zafón through the streets of Ciutat Vella have to concentrate a lot not to lose the thread in the face of the overdose of souvenir dens or the biblical plague of giant caganers.
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