Does Tourism End Up Spoiling Places ?
Of course, there’s a snobbery among travellers. And one form it takes is the ‘you should have been here yesterday’, rather like a fisherman or a surfer.
If I had a Peruvian peso for every time that someone has told me they went to Machu Picchu ‘way back when, before the crowds and almost had it to ourselves…’, I could afford to stay at one of the luxury new five-star hotels that line the route to the Inca citadel.
Yes, Machu Picchu gets almost 1,000,000 visitors a year now. Yes, that means that the Peruvian government has had to manage both the situation and the site—particularly given that it is only accessible by rail or foot down a narrow valley. Daily visitor numbers are limited, both to the ruins and on the famous Inca trail for those who want to walk there across the Andes.
I actually think they’ve done rather well, with the encouragement of UNESCO, for whom Machu Picchu is not just a world heritage site for its architecture, but also for its wildlife, a rare double honour. They’ve certainly done better than the British government has with Stonehenge, its premium prehistoric monument, which has been fenced off so the actual stones cannot be visited, but only viewed from afar. The million visitors who go there each year have to patrol around the outskirts on a ‘designated walkway’, listening to an audiophone which tells you what it would be like if you were allowed inside the ruins themselves—hardly an immersive experience.
The issue of how to manage tourist numbers is becoming more acute everywhere from Angkor Wat to the Taj Mahal. Pompeii has now closed off a great many areas of the Roman remains preserved by an earthquake that used to be open in the 1960s.
And do I agree that Machu Picchu used to have a golden age when tourists could roam free like alpaca across its slopes? Not really. I first took an expedition to the area in 1982 and have been returning ever since over 35 years. I’ve written two books on Peru—The White Rock and Cochineal Red—discussing the Inca legacy. For me, it remains a place which, like the Taj Mahal, has an infinity of charms. As an open air site, Machu Picchu can also absorb a great many tourists (which is much more difficult to do, say, with the Sistine Chapel in Rome, which can quickly become claustrophobic as it gets crowded). Of course, the experience of visiting the talismanic Inca site may have changed. But only a travel snob would use that as an excuse not to go there.