‘To be a tourist is to escape accountability,’ writes Don DeLillo in The Names. ‘Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence.’ Accountability may finally have arrived. The enormous growth of tourism in recent years has provoked a growing and well-publicised backlash in some of the most popular destinations, featuring public protests, laws limiting Airbnb rentals and the occasional attack by water guns. The Future of Travel, by veteran food and culture writer Daniel Maurer, is a good introduction to the current state of tourism and its discontents. 

Maurer tells this story by way of his own. Laid off during the first weeks of Covid, he decides to leave New York and become a full-time travel writer, spending the next couple of years freelancing happily around Latin America. But while enjoying bone marrow esquites in Mexico City, beachside tranquillity in Montevideo and cosmopolitan living on the cheap in Buenos Aires, he can’t help but notice that these cities are already losing their character to tourism – and that he’s accelerating this process by writing about the few unspoiled places that remain. 

While Maurer is in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei, devalues the peso, raising the cost of living even for expats with dollars. The author decamps to Spain, which he quickly discovers is ground zero for the backlash against over-tourism. In Barcelona, shops on Las Ramblas sell ‘I heart