I suppose that when one is away from home, one pays more attention to people's character. A few decades ago, a book called Queridos mallorquines was circulating in Mallorca, attributed to an author named Guy de Forestier. The author was actually a Catalan architect, I believe, who had been living in Mallorca for years and claimed to have discovered the peculiarities of the local character, which he presented with more than questionable grace, but with enough success and re-editions. However, reflections on what marks the local character of peoples or the indigenous people of a certain place are as numerous as the history of anthropology. Thus, Hippocrates, five centuries before Christ, was already trying to think about how climate determines the temperament of peoples. Aristotle wanted to think of the character of the Greeks as a middle ground between the brave people of the north and the Asians, rapacious but without spirit. And since then, we have seen ourselves as the 'good ones', in contrast to the barbarians, or those who have violent customs, but at the same time are austere and reckless. All reflections on 'national characters' are more than questionable, especially because they teach us to see others as clichés, no matter how much statistics or an outside perspective may end up finding common traits. If one travels through Galicia, for example, one might end up agreeing with those who speak of a ‘Galician character’, which would not necessarily be very different from the Mallorcan character, or at least in some of its most notable traits. The famous ‘retranca’ or irony, reserve or tendency to never quite say what one thinks, we can say we also share; the cliché says that if you find a Galician in the middle of a staircase, it’s hard to tell if they are going up or down, partly because they themselves tell you that ‘it depends’. Nor do you need to be an anthropologist or a historian of cultures to realize that the character formed in smallholdings or in very isolated rural communities can end up being very different from that of large urban concentrations. But the fog, the woods, the sea and the shipwrecks, living facing the Atlantic, or the special relationship with death end up defining the character in a very particular way, especially opaque to outsiders, and all this plus the own language make a country elevated on a memory and understandings that are difficult to access. Perhaps the character of a people is not, after all, an essence, but a way of protecting oneself. There are communities that have defended themselves with walls and others with a language, some silences, an irony or a certain distrust of the foreigner. And perhaps it is here where mass tourism is most transformative: not because it brings outsiders, but because it forces insiders to become accessible, friendly, and translatable with Google. A touristified country ends up constantly explaining itself to others and, by dint of explaining itself, runs the risk of simplifying itself to the point of cliché. Perhaps the last privilege of a people is to preserve something that the visitor cannot buy or fully understand: the right to continue being, to some extent, opaque to the eyes of those who are only passing through.
