This short piece comments on the articles presented in the forum on Adriatic tourism and their analyses of competing historical claims to “our Adriatic.” The comment focuses on questions raised about ownership of the sea and the Adriatic's borders of belonging. While sovereignty over areas of the Adriatic has proven an enduring diplomatic issue in both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the forum authors instead consider claims by different types of actors: tourists (particularly Czech tourists who claimed a special relationship between Czechs and their South Slav “brothers”); investors in hotels and related infrastructure; socialist Yugoslav tourism planners; and environmentalists concerned with issues of pollution. In tracing out tensions in the agendas of hosts and visitors, as well as planners and scientists, the forum's essays measure and map the socio-ecological metabolism of the modern eastern Adriatic.

This article discusses discourses of Czech tourism on the Eastern Adriatic coast between the turn of the twentieth century and the 1930s using the Czech resorts in Baška on Krk Island and Kupari near Dubrovnik as case studies. The author argues that the ideological foundation of this type of tourism was a narrative of proximity between the Czechs and their fellow Slav Croatians. At the same time, the practice of Czech tourism was characterized by a pattern of cultural paternalism and economic exploitation toward the local population. It thus became a pseudo-colonial enterprise that distorted the Czech national myth of democracy, rationalism, and cosmopolitanism. Nevertheless, tourism still contributed to cultural mediation between Czechs and South Slavs. This article illustrates that point by highlighting the commemoration of the Yugoslav playwright Ivo Vojnović by Czech tourists in the 1930s.

This article provides a picture of the political economy of tourism and violence in Medellín. It analyses the way criminal actors and tourism entrepreneurs share a territory, by shedding light on the extortion of tour guides, street performers and business owners in some of its barrios populares (poor neighbourhoods). The main objective is to demonstrate how intimate relationships – between and among kin, friends, long-term acquaintances – impact what is considered the criminal governance of tourism. This contribution shows that extortion in Medellín meets only limited resistance from tourism entrepreneurs. It also emphasises how criminals, tourism actors and tourists themselves contribute to the creation of fragile secured spaces in the developing touristscapes of Colombia's second city.

This article reconstructs the heated – local and national – debate around the consistent and pervasive foreign presence in the border territory of Lake Garda on the eve of the Great War. Here, the growing nationalistic tensions that preceded the conflict intertwined with the emerging hospitality industry. Tourism, seen as a social phenomenon, can thus offer a privileged perspective on the transformations of the general context of the time. Introduced by Austro-Germanic inhabitants of the lake at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the hospitality industry on Lake Garda flourished up to the eve of the Great War. There were, however, also opponents to this model of development. The dispute escalated to the point that, in the perception of the locals, the ‘outsiders’ turned into ‘enemies’ and Lake Garda increasingly became a disputed area: a symbol of the tensions of the time.

The Swedish North is sometimes described as a resource periphery, while others choose to label it a pleasure periphery. Regardless of the terms used, the region is characterised by problems such as out-migration and demographic issues. This study investigates why there are such different perceptions of the same area, and whether there is any contradiction between extractive resource industries and the tourism industry. This is done by collecting visitor data from mining companies and conducting interviews with a variety of respondents in three mining communities in northern Sweden. Mining tourism is a phenomenon occurring in this region and can be regarded as a context in which the two main narratives meet while being a rather overlooked form of tourism. This is partly due to the low level of knowledge regarding its impacts, but also to a somewhat established idea of mining tourism as a “bad” form of tourism. Individuals’ perceptions of mining tourism as a phenomenon seem to be highly value-related and influenced by both location and occupation. As such, various opinions can be explained by social exchange theory, which proposes that attitudes will be influenced by individuals’ evaluation of outcomes for themselves and their community. In this paper, the emergence of mining tourism is understood as knowledge creation rooted in a regional path dependency on mining and tourism. Hence, mining tourism becomes a new regional tourism product that contributes to tourism, at least in terms of standard technical visits and, at best, a well-developed tourist attraction that appeals to visitors in quantities similar to iconic regional attractions such as the Icehotel. Then again, a tourism industry selling dreams of “untouched nature” argues that this tourism product produces “bad imaging”.

Contemporary cinema and media studies are marked by a materialist turn that highlights material elements, such as objects, non-human agencies, the environment and places on and off screen, as well as the materiality of media productions and consumption. This article expands on the important scholarship of “materialist” media studies as well as existing ecocinema scholarship by stressing the materiality of digital landscapes in contemporary Chinese fantasy (or qihuan and xuanhuan) film and television works that have gained significant popularity in China and Hong Kong. Specifically, this article examines the animist landscape in film and television adaptions of Eternal Love, a fantasy romance television serial that loosely draws on Daoist mythology. Focusing on the material aspects of digital landscapes of Chinese fantasy cinema, the article develops the notion of the “cinema–ecology complex” to address the materiality of digital landscapes, the cinematic footprint of digitally enhanced landscapes through location shooting and the consumption of landscapes as scenic spots, including daka practices, in film studio cities and related film-induced tourism. Ultimately, this article calls for a textual–infrastructural approach in cinema and media studies, which tends to reorient to the infrastructural aspects of media production, distribution and consumption.

The socioeconomics of the Anthropocene is exposing coastal regions to multiple pressures, including climate change hazards, resource degradation, urban development and inequality. Tourism is often raised as either a panacea to, or exacerbator of, such threats to ecosystems and sustainable livelihoods. To better understand the impacts of tourism on coastal areas, Scopus and Web of Science databases were searched for the top 100 cited papers on coastal tourism. Web of Science suggested ‘highly cited’ papers were also included to allow for more recent high-impact papers. Of the papers retrieved, 44 focused on the impacts of tourism. Social/cultural and environmental impacts were viewed as mostly negative, while economic impacts were viewed as mostly positive but only of actual benefit to a few. In addition, when compared with recent whole-of-sector reviews and reports it was evident that coastal tourism is increasingly a global enterprise dominated by large corporations that leverage various interests across local to transnational scales. Through this global enterprise, even the positive economic benefits identified were overshadowed by a broader system of land and property development fuelling local wealth inequity and furthering the interests of offshore beneficiaries. Only two highly cited papers discussed tourism within a broader context of integrated coastal zone management, suggesting that tourism is mostly assessed as a discrete sector within the coastal zone and peripheral to other coastal management considerations or the global tourism sector as a whole. The findings have relevance to the holistic management of coasts, coastal tourism and the achievement of sustainable development goals in a way that considers the increasing threats from coastal hazards, resource extraction and urbanisation, as well as the pervasive impacts of international business systems from local to global scales.

In this article, we explore tourism development as an ongoing becoming-with and in the world. We draw on Haraway’s concept of worlding to describe the coming together of tourism not as a solitary or industry-related endeavour, but as entangled. We introduce the analytical concepts of frictions, companions and string figures to exemplify and discuss what this looks like when stepping closer to the tinkering with tourism. The article illustrates and discusses ways to re-conceptualise tourism development not as a simple solution to local problem, but as world-making in tension. We abstain from identifying “good” tourism and claims of how to pursue ways to “fix” tourism, instead tending to how tourism actors imagine and tinker with and around tourism towards more livable futures in a turbulent terrain.

We report for the first time the effects of vehicle traffic and beachgoer trampling on macrobenthic communities of Amazonian sandy beaches. Sampling was performed during four consecutive months with different beach use intensity in 2017 (before, during vacation, and two months after the vacation period) on three contrasting beaches with regard to disturbance (Urban: Atalaia; Intermediate: Farol-Velho; and Protected: Corvinas) in the intertidal zone along two equidistant transects at seven equidistant sampling stations from the high-tide water mark to the swash zone. At each sampling station, four biological and sediment samples were randomly collected. Also, in each station, the sediment compaction was determined using a manual penetrometer. Physical sediment variables remained constant over time in all beaches, whereas differences were found in sediment compaction over the months. Macrobenthic community differences in density and richness among months were observed at Atalaia and Farol-Velho beaches. In contrast, Corvinas beach remained constant throughout the study period. Furthermore, the vulnerability of the polychaetes Thoracophellia papillata, Scolelepis squamata and Paraonis sp. indicates that they might be potential indicators of recreational activity impact.

Following the seminal work of Lévi-Strauss, developed by Baker and Nelson and Duymedjian and Rüling, this paper analyzes the role that entrepreneurial bricolage played as an innovation tool in the origins and growth of four important Spanish tourism companies: Meliá, Barceló, Iberostar, and Riu. Their development has been deeply embedded in the island of Majorca (Spain), whose historical market conditions shaped and drove the companies’ bricolage actions. Entrepreneurial bricolage has generally been studied from a short-term perspective; however, this work adopts a dynamic approach that, instead of focusing on the concept of bricolage, aims to explain its evolution over time. To this end, four historical and qualitative case studies are used. The main contribution made by this paper is that the four companies did not limit their bricolage actions to contexts of scarcity but made this type of entrepreneurship a regular mechanism in their business practices, as the island’s tourism context thrived. However, the resulting innovations, as well as their main drivers, did indeed change over time.