The Venice menace

shops screaming with tourist tat. The hordes shuffle around Venice’s must-see highlights, gawping, snapping pictures, vacantly oblivious to the wonders they are supposedly experiencing. You don’t have to be an aesthete, or a cultural snob, to sense the Venetian’s dismay.

Of course, Venice wants its visitors that provide residents with work, and profit. But at least half of the tourists are there just for the day, and don’t use the town’s hotels or even its restaurants, eating at fastfood chains or bringing a packed lunch in their backpacks. The crisis in Venice is so desperate that the

The speed with which a pretty fishing village such as St Tropez can be transformed into a pinnacle of vulgarity is bewildering. Similarly, Cancun in Mexico, home to some of the nicest beaches in the world, has in just a couple of decades been turned into a suffocating tourist trap. Cancun is now renowned for having some of the most unpleasant holiday infrastructure anywhere on earth.

The writers of the Rough Guides and the Lonely Planet tourist books must wonder if they destroy the unspoilt places they discover by sharing them with the world. By driving people to the next “undiscovered” place, such as Ko Phi Phi in Thailand, when they return they must end up saying “Man, this place used to be so cool 10 years ago.”