This came up on Instagram on Monday – the Louvre closed its doors in June under the pressure of “unmanageable crowds”. Oh, it’s not just the crowds, it’s also chronic overstaffing and structural problems but the thousands upon thousands of people seem to have been the final straw that broke the camel’s back. Near From Home reshared it and asked “I will never understand why this museum is SO popular. Like, it’s a great museum but are all 8 million yearly visitors ACTUALLY interested in fine art, or have we all just been told repeatedly that you have to go here?” and that seemed like a great subject for a travel blog.
Do we go to places because we actually want to, because we’re actually interested in them, or do we go to them because we’ve been told this is the correct and important place to visit? I am not into fine art at all. I went to the Louvre on a school trip when I was in year ten, I think, and I have no intention of going back. The Louvre is a beautiful piece of architecture but I have zero interest in trudging its halls and galleries to look at pictures. Maybe I’m a philistine with no appreciation for art or culture but I don’t want to spend a day in Paris stuck in a museum because someone arbitrarily decided it was a Thing To Do In Paris. On the other hand, I will always make a pilgrimage to the Eiffel Tower. Now, I know it’s another of the Things You Have To Do but I genuinely like the Eiffel Tower. I like to sit somewhere not too far away and stare at it and wonder how this bit of steampunk weirdness ended up here in the first place and why it got left here. I know the answer to this: it was built for the 1889 World’s Fair and kept beyond its 20-year permit because it was useful for communication, and by the time it became less useful, it had become the symbol of Paris. Nonetheless, it’s a really weird thing that’s really out of place in the entire rest of the city. That’s why I like it.
A lot of traditional tourist sites have become tourist sites for a reason. Notre-Dame is one of Paris’s big sites because it’s a magnificent and ancient cathedral and people like that. Do they like it more than Sainte-Chapelle across the road, which is just as ancient and a lot more magnificent and spectacular? …yeah, they do. Notre-Dame is A-list, Sainte-Chapelle isn’t, but should be. The Louvre became popular because it’s full of some of the greatest art in human history. And because it contains the Mona Lisa, which someone arbitrarily decided is the greatest portrait ever painted. Take the Mona Lisa away and for a while, people will take photos of the space on the wall where it used to be. Then watch visitor numbers decline.
The other reason the to-do list of popular tourist sites became popular is because they make planning easy. There’s no need to examine what you personally are actually interested in and then do some research to find things you’re interested in in a new place, figure out the logistics of how to get to them and how long to spend there and what to prioritise while you’re away. No, there’s a to-do list already curated for you and you just work your way down it. It’s when you start making return visits to a place that you can start to look beyond the ready-made list. It’s why some places remain more popular than others: they have that list. I daresay there are dozens of cities in France just as interesting as Paris, at least for people who don’t live there, but they require you to either find the list or make it yourself, so people just go to Paris. There are probably dozens of museums far more interesting than the Louvre, or more specific to different people’s interests, but they don’t make it onto the list and so people don’t know about them. It’s all about the list. It’s all about letting someone else do the thinking for you.
And when they become tourist sites, when they go on that list, people start to go to these places specifically for these things. It used to be “while you’re in Paris, you have to see these things”. Now you go to Paris to see these things. People dream of going to the Eiffel Tower, going to the Louvre, going to Notre-Dame. There’s no concept of just going to Paris or Rome because it’s a famous, historic and beautiful city, with the to-do list as a bonus to make it easier to plan. You go to Paris or Rome with no interest in the wider context of the city but just to see the things you’ve been told to see.
That, I think, is where some people like to draw the line between tourist and traveller. A tourist follows the established to-do list, goes to the same places as everyone else and takes the same photos. A traveller is more inventive, more original, does their own research and goes to different places. I think a tourist and a traveller are the same thing separated only by snobbishness myself. I went on a school trip to Paris in year 12 where Mr Moore made an effort to take us to places we wouldn’t have been before, where very few people had been. A women’s charity, Louis Vuitton’s very own house, the sewers, behind the scenes at CDG. We were still tourists, even if we weren’t going to the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. I bet we went to the Eiffel Tower on our free afternoon. Can you believe we were let off to wander around Paris unsupervised aged sixteen? I was nominally in charge “because you know how the metro works”. Readers, I knew exactly the same as everyone else who’d been in the lesson where they explained that the destination is written on the front of the train.
It feels like there are two ways to go with these big sights. You either automatically go and see them because if you’re in the place, you’ve got to, or you go to the opposite extreme where you flatly refuse to because you’re no boring sheep-like tourist. Either way, you’re letting what’s popular dictate your plans, either by incorporating them or staying away from them. As I said, most of these places are popular for a reason. When I went to Rome, my main bucket list item was the Sistine Chapel (“before it burns down“) but since I was there, I also ticked off the Coliseum, the Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps (and came away from the Spanish Steps utterly bewildered as to why they’re so popular. They’re just a staircase!).
Having said that I hate fine art and have no interest in museums, I did go to the Hermitage when I was in St Petersburg in 2019. As the post said, not because I was interested in the art but because I’d been told it was a place I had to go. I didn’t hate it. I did it about as thoroughly as I’ve ever done a colossal museum. I’ve skipped every other museum in every other city I’ve ever been to. Yes, I pick & choose a little bit from the established list. Do the tower, do the Roman ruin, do the church. Don’t bother with this museum or that museum. Do the Blue Lagoon but also do Fontana and the local swimming pool. Skip Disneyland but go to the opera. For Paris, I now actively seek out things I haven’t done before. They’re still on the tourist to-do list but they’re a little lower down – B- and C-list, not A-list. You’ll hear more about that later in the year.
There’s nothing wrong with going to the popular places. As tourism spirals out of control, there are benefits to corralling tourists in a handful of places designed to cope with them and these places are popular for a reason. I’m the last person to tell you that you should go to a place and skip the thing that’s so important to that place that it’s included in the place’s logo. But maybe you should look beyond the tourist to-do list for things that are actually personally interesting to you and include a few of them. Visit some places you haven’t seen ten thousand times in other people’s holiday snaps. Just a thought.
I Am A Polar Bear 