If you were a tourist over Spring break, you might have been part of a guided tour group. And if not, you probably saw one at some point or another; they’re impossible to miss. They travel in herds and wear emblems of outsiders, often in the form of bright lanyards with Nokia-esque transmitters and those airline wire headphones that everyone seemingly wants to give out but never take back. In my experience, these tourists are also usually in their mid-fifties, wearing cargo shorts and a tucked-in Dri-Fit Nike polo, carrying a GoPro they leave rolling until the tour is over. Among them, white Hokas seem to be the shoe of choice, and sometimes they sport a New York Yankees cap.
The species of tourist I’m talking about isn’t those merely visiting a museum or art gallery for a few hours. They’re going on those 8-hour-long tours in which they’re trapped on a comfortable, air-conditioned coach bus for a while before arriving in some city they’ve already seen in a Rick Steves book guide. Over the break, I found myself on one of these tours to Ronda, Spain–a city whose mountainous terrain has presented a unique opportunity to balance grand, human-made architectural wonders with its natural landscape. Besides the long tradition of bullfighting in Ronda, this sublime delicacy between humanity and nature is its biggest draw, and not just to modern tourists. Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles were frequent visitors, the former once saying “The entire town and as far as you can see in any direction is romantic background.” But unlike the modern tourists, Hemingway and Welles lived in the moment instead of through a guide.
The bus left early in the morning and the sky was still slightly gray. With about thirty minutes of the ride left, the tour guide offered a brief history of Ronda in three languages to account for the Americans, British, Australians, French, and the rare Spaniard, all of which could be identified fairly accurately by their preferred mode of nicotine intake (Americans and Elfbars, the French and heatsticks, the British and cigarettes). A true veteran, the guide effortlessly switched between languages to answer questions from the fifty of us who were on the bus, and ensured that everyone knew the departure time and location. As we deboarded we followed her single-file, like preschoolers on the sidewalk of the city’s central road. Audio guides in hand, we drew the attention of locals who looked at us with squinted eyes, slightly raised upper lips, and furrowed brows.
Most of the tourists seemed to think they were invisible. They plowed through people, shoved their way to the edges of overlooks as if the landscape were about to disappear, stopped walking suddenly to take photographs with their phones, cut people off, and talked incredibly loud. They were led from place to place with headphones in their ears, making sure to follow the tour guide’s beacon—a dark brown umbrella that she raised to indicate that it was time to go.
Everything was dangerously convenient, which isn’t meant to pin any type of blame on the tour guide but rather on the attitudes of the tourists (especially the American ones, whose tendency to see the world as created for them seemed to be at an all-time high). The guide, for example, had to switch between languages for Americans, not even because English was the only language they knew but because there exists some strange refusal in many American minds to even attempt to understand anything that isn’t in English. They treated the city like an amusement park, photographing and filming all of the ancient attractions as if they existed purely to entertain them. They didn’t care about the city in the present; they blocked out its noise with their headphones, acted as if the locals didn’t exist, and immersed themselves in Ronda’s caricature.
They came into the city as Americans and left as such. They visited so conveniently and efficiently that they obfuscated their experience. They seem to forget that part of the joy of traveling comes from being drawn outside of yourself and being made to feel uncomfortable. Sure, the tourists I was with probably learned a great deal of facts about the city and its history, but they weren’t really present. They could’ve learned everything that was on the audio tour by spending five minutes on Ronda’s Wikipedia page or by watching a number of Rick Steves’ documentaries from the comfort of their homes. If only they stopped filming for a minute or two, took out their headphones, felt their feet tethered to the ground, and looked around.
Oscar Heller was the Opinion desk editor for the 2024-25 school year. He has also been a staff writer. Currently, he is one of the Editors-in-Chief for the 2025-26 school year.
