Tourism and Stereotypes

Stereotypes are simplifications, reductions that mind generates in order to understand the complexity of the world. Unlike many alleged intellectuals think, stereotypes are not a bad thing, existing only in the minds of less able or uninformed people. A word, for example, in itself holds a single stereotype which defines at the same time, though it helps humans to understand each other by sharing and combining them into sentences, and roughly describing ideas. "Car" is a stereotype of all possible and existing cars, and when I say "I saw a red car", most of people identify what I mean. It helps me to generalize and refer to any possible car without specifying which one I am talking about.

However, sometimes, stereotypes are wrong identifications of categories in reality. They don't correspond to anything existing in the world, or they are misleading and wrongly specified, being a bad tool to understand any given situation. The balance between the error provided by a certain generalization and its correctness should be a good measure of the utility for a given stereotype. "All French people stink" is probably a wrong stereotype, while "all pigs do stink" is certainly a helpful one.

Traveling is a good way to break a priori stereotypes about places and people or, at least, it used to be. Nowadays, due to tourism, I guess the omelette has flipped around and most people just travel to confirmed a priori real or invented stereotypes. They travel to Kyoto to see geishas in the same way they travelled to Spain to meet bullfighters, and they basically don't care or don't know whether there is almost no geisha left or that bullfighting has been banned in some areas of Spain.

Each language and nationality has their own "lonely planet" kind of books, and it seems that all of them have read the same, over and over, repeating ad nauseam the same common places, stereotypes, misunderstandings and, sometimes, lies. After a couple of decades trying to teach German, French and English lumpen tourists that most of Spanish were not whole-day flamenco-dancing paella-eating sangria-drinking bullfighters -at least, not in Catalonia, the area surrounding Barcelona-, now it seems that the tale has started all over again with other kinds of tourists, like asian ones.

However, after so many years of uninformed visitors asking to attend to a "tablao flamenco", and to eat tapas and paella, we have finally made up places where they can find such things, as they had imagined, such in Les Rambles; not as they really are. I am not saying that there was no flamenco in Barcelona before the tourists came. Yeah, there was, in gypsy camps on the beach, an awful place called Somorrostro. Tapas? Yeah, though never heard of them before the Spanish immigration in the 60's and always associated with Andalusian-style bars on the periphery of Barcelona. And paella? Well, strictly, a paella is a frying pan, and also the way Valencian people call a type of rice-based dish. We call it "arros a la paella" to distinguish it from other kinds of dishes such "arros a la cassola", for example. When talking in general, we just say "arros" (rice).

So what do tourists get when they visit Barcelona? Fake flamenco, with Argentinian dancers (true!), bad and pricy tapas (they should taste those in Madrid, Andalusia and/or the Basque Country!), and awfully yellow and oily paellas. Have these things anything to do with Barcelona? Nope, just about the character of Catalan people, who would try to cheat even Christ telling him they are jews to book him a room.

However, we have a new breed of connoisseurs, these tourists who think they know something about us because they have been informed by Argentinean bartenders. Those guys know (or think at least they know) about Catalan things such as "pa amb tomaquet" or "all-i-oli", but they can't see the difference between dry bread soaked in grated tomato or garlic-fied plain mayonnaise and the true dishes, which in Barcelona are almost impossible to find. But we shouldn't blame them! We should blame us, who allow to sell in souvenir shops Mexican hats and let ignorant bartenders to give advise about our local cuisine.

So, for the sake of truth, I suggest to anyone really interested in knowing anything about Barcelona, just burn immediately all tourist guides and books about the city, and when coming here, avoid anywhere with a density of non-locals higher than 5%, if you really can tell the difference. Nevertheless, if what you want to find is just a bunch of wrong stereotypes like in an attraction park, then Barcelona is your place. Welcome onboard!