One of the factors that most likely tips the scales when determining whether a region of the planet has a future or not in tourism must involve determining the degree of self-esteem or more or less marked identity that its natives have. It cannot be easy to 'touristify' those places where the natives are closed off and surly, among themselves and in front of others, or those places where the local language is so deeply rooted and so impenetrable that foreigners never manage to find a place for themselves, even if they want to. In Sparta, there even existed the institution of 'xenelasia', or the right to expel foreigners who might corrupt local customs. Mass tourism implies, first of all, that people are willing to travel, and have the curiosity and resources to see other parts of the planet, but above all it implies that a large part of the locals in a given place have to change, not only their jobs but their morality and attitude. Perhaps this is why when an area is very touristy, those who manage it are no longer local workers but immigrants, people who have come from outside to work, and who may have that degree of uncommitted, empty, and stereotypically friendly courtesy that is expected almost everywhere. The tourism sector tends to replace personal and rooted relationships with the professionalization of customer service. There are many places in Japan, for example, where tourists are not welcome, and are even denied a table in restaurants, no matter how much space there is for local diners. Elsewhere, for example, they will never put restaurant menus in English or any 'international' or foreign language, and whoever wants to eat there must adapt or learn the language of the country, which contrasts sharply with what we have done in the Islands, for example, where we have systematically taken it upon ourselves to suppress and hide what is our own, from the cuisine to the language, not to mention those who have done this corrosive work from a Castilianist perspective, putting everything at the feet of a Spain that does not adapt to them when the journey is made in the opposite direction. But a healthy society should allow itself the luxury of not always being liked. Having peculiar hours, an unpresentable cuisine, or cumbersome bureaucracy for outsiders. But now everything is becoming a product that must adjust to visitors' expectations; 'turistification' is not just the arrival of millions of people, but the psychological transformation of a community, which ends up looking at itself through the eyes of the visitor and modifying itself to satisfy that thirsty gaze. It is a very deep mechanism because when this happens, renunciation no longer seems imposed from the outside, but is experienced as a free decision, almost as a virtue: that of always being kind, always available, and always understandable. This is, probably, the most subtle and lasting form of cultural transformation, the hole through which a corrosive liquid enters that ends up killing everything.
