Changing places: Mediterranean tourist resorts in Francoist Spain

Abstract

38836, Carpeta 28 (a), 'Informe de la Comisión Sectorial de Turismo, 20/02/1965'.2 Margarita Capdepón Frías, 'Conflictos ambientales derivados de la urbanización turístico-residencial.Un caso aplicado al litoral alicantino', Boletín de la Asociación de Geográficos Españoles, 71 (2016), pp.31-57, p. 37. 3 https://documentacion.diputacionalicante.es/3demogr.asp?codigo=03031.This article sets out to reconceptualise how we think about the spectacular development of such resorts.Geographers pioneered the study of resort transformations through a focus on changes to the built environment.They have shown how resorts grew in unusual ways often lacking a central business district and featuring instead recreational business districts peppered along the coastline.They have impressively explored issues such as the role of capital in creating resorts or the flow of tourists across borders, alongside the spatial distribution of different types of tourist accommodation.Environmental destruction fuelled by capitalist development and speculation in resorts has also featured prominently.4 Anthropologists, by contrast, have brought tremendous insights into human relations between hosts and guests.5 For their part, historians have long viewed of resorts as exceptional and largely non-Spanish sites, although in recent years a trend has emerged examining the role of major Spanish entrepreneurs or the reactions of ordinary Spaniards to the arrival of mass tourism.Historians have also interpreted resorts as centres primarily of freedom and as increasingly inclusive spaces.This emancipatory view often finds a complement in historians' analysis of protests against tourism through the lens of the right-to-the-city 4 Zelmair Cantillon, Resort Spatiality.