Weekend tourist hypocrisy: insulting others doing exactly the same

Weekend tourists against weekend tourists: the beachgoer who despises other beachgoers

Every high season the same scene plays out: families arriving in Benidorm, Gandía or Mojácar and spending the day running down the other visitors. The favourite insult is "day tripper", hurled with contempt at someone doing exactly the same thing as the person hurling it. It is not a new phenomenon, but it has escalated into an identity score-settling.

The identity battle

The contradiction is explained by the desire to stand apart from the crowd. Whoever goes to the beach on a weekend wants to feel unique; on finding thousands of people just like them, the frustration looks for a scapegoat. And it finds one in the other: the one from the inland, or the one from the city, as the case may be. The rest are traces of geographic classism, with Spain's inland plateau and the coast as trenches.

One of the most striking exchanges veers into railways: the Iberian gauge, those six Castilian feet that separate Spain from the rest of Europe, was the decision of a Valencian engineer, Juan Subercase y Krets. The anecdote serves to illustrate that regional identities are more complex than the stereotype of the "country bumpkin" or the "beach lout". The full exchange includes cross accusations we do not reproduce here, but which show how far the bile of the Spanish tourist can go.

Where the domestic tourist goes

Where the Spanish domestic tourist is heading now is another open front. The very people who look down on Benidorm no longer just go to Rome, Prague or Thailand, as one voice points out: they seek the same sun, but with a touch of exoticism. The paradox is that "escaping the crowds" has become the fastest way to find them, only with a plane ticket in between.

In the end, the day tripper is not a specific type of person, but all of us when we run into someone who had the same idea. The difference is the distance each one is willing to put between their parasol and the other's. And in that war, nobody wins, except whoever sells paradise in brochures.