Mass tourism is an obvious social conquest and a source of wealth. It is a virtuous consequence of the democratization of pleasures, that is to say, of the redistribution of social rights, but also a threat to the planet’s big cities and tourist areas. Not only because of the predation of the territory and the diaspora of the urban centers, but also because of the attachment to the social, economic and political structure. Jorge Dioni López (Benavente, 1974) reflects on these questions in El malestar de las ciudades (Arpa Editores), an essay that works like a picker that strips the machinery of the movement that today threatens and segregates urban life, La Vanguardia has talked at length with him.

In view of the tourist saturation suffered for years by a country that receives more than 80 million visitors each year -almost twice as many as its indigenous population-, for years now we have not stopped hearing references to “quality tourism”, a expression that makes López go off the alarms. He believes that the mayors or governors of areas of high tourist attraction who make this appeal seem to be unaware that they are appealing to segregation, to the establishment of castes based on purchasing power, which is already done by, for example, theocracies of the Persian Gulf, and at the same time overlook the fact that they themselves lead communities that emit tourists, that is to say, that the inhabitants of those cities themselves are at the same time, during a period of the year, tourists – surely customers of low-cost tourism – in other places. “What do the mayors of Barcelona or Malaga mean when they talk about quality tourists, that of the inhabitants of their city only the rich travel?”.

Regarding this other low-cost tourism, Dioni López emphasizes that it is a structure based on the confluence of two precarities, that of the visitor who can only afford this way of traveling and that of the worker in the service sector, in identical conditions . In fact, both are one and the same at different times of the year, he explains.

Regarding this, López alludes to the Victorian series Downton Abbey, created by Julian Fellowes for the British network ITV – although he could have resorted to the classic Up and Down, grandmother of the aforementioned – as ·legory of the very serious problems that cross the Balearic Islands, where the employees that the tourism sector needs to attract in season receive wages that the housing bubble makes insufficient to find one. “There are several hotel companies that will offer a house to the workers, a Downton Abbey system in which the service will work in small rooms that will be in the basement.”

This model of a predatory economy, antithetical to the Fordist production scheme – based on the fact that the products they offer must be affordable for the workers who make them, the author explains – has led to a point where, for the capital dispersed in the cloud that directs them, inequality has ceased to be a problem and has become a plan: “In Downton you can see quite well how, while the welfare state is advancing, the house no longer can pay servants and diminishes the service that is under the house”. It is therefore about stopping this, a model of “neo-restoration that longs to return to before 1789”. “The welfare state puts an end to the system that allowed there to be a million English people working as servants”. For this reason, he believes, inequality is a goal, not a collateral effect. “People wonder why in Madrid they have eliminated the night high school. Well, because there are no people who want to work as a waiter”.