Benjamin's prophetic gaze

In May 2024, the press reported on demonstrations in the streets of several cities in Spain to demand control and regularization of uncontrolled and invasive tourism that disrupts the lives of citizens. The municipality of Ibiza, affected by this problem, was a clear example. The Diario de Ibiza was published, that last week of May, with headlines such as "Around 1,000 people protest against the mass tourism in Ibiza" or "We are foreigners on our island". Ninety years earlier, the Ibizan press also warned of these dangers; at the same time, however, it claimed the hypothetical benefits of tourism. The Diario de Ibiza itself wrote on January 7, 1932: "The immense importance that the tourism industry has for Ibiza is finally becoming apparent", although the Ibizan weekly Excelsior warned on September 10, 1932 that "the tourist attracted by the singularity ends up destroying it".

The destruction of paradise. Ibiza, Walter Benjamin and the first tourist development offers a look at the evolution of the island and tourism through Benjamin's eyes, but we have also extended our own perspective through periodicals. The debate between progress and conservation arose from the very beginning, but has been reproduced over the years. Benjamin thought that Ibiza was a paradise and that tourists would destroy it. How can the construction of hotels with electricity and running water destroy a place?

Obviously, Walter Benjamin thought in terms of the future, in a logic that we could call prophetic, in the sense that he saw in these innovations the first origins or seeds of a potentially massive and destructive tourist growth, of what we now call - and often criticize - as touristification.

That is why, when Benjamin said that there is "valuable time" left before the new hotels in Ibiza are completed, he was also thinking about the massive arrival of tourists who, in principle, would seem to represent progress that he would like to stop, of a modernity that he would not want to disturb this island world still anchored in the past, in traditional ways of life and architecture.