La destrucció del paradís?

Description

In 1932, Walter Benjamin wrote: “But there are already unfinished hotel buildings in Eivissa and Sant Antoni, in which running water is promised to foreigners. The time until their completion has become precious”. These reflections are the product of his stays on the island in 1932 and 1933. When he wrote these words, tourism was only timidly beginning to develop on Ibiza. That same year, 1932, new, modern hotels were inaugurated and things were slowly beginning to change. Back in 1933, San Antonio became expensive and unbearable and he thought of fleeing the colony of foreign tourists. Without theorizing specifically about tourism, Walter Benjamin offered interesting reflections on travel, on means of transport, on tourism, on the levelling or flattening of the earth - what we would today call 'globalization'. Benjamin devoted texts to postcards - at that time intimately connected with tourism - or to the very modern phenomenon of the disappointed traveller or the traveller who tries unsuccessfully to “connect” with the place and its inhabitants. The analysis of the preserved documentation, as well as the press of the time, provides an insight into how the island was being transformed and the debates that were taking place (the need to build new hotels, the material heritage and its conservation, the disappearance of folklore and typical Ibizan clothing, etc.). Finally, we present a selection of Benjamin's fictional writings with an Ibizan theme or setting, which allow us to capture indirectly, on the one hand, his experience of the island and, on the other, how these stories reflect not only Ibiza but also the author's thought and theoretical reflection.