Travellers and Tourists
Tenerife became a popular destination on The Grand Tour , the European circuit that became a fashionable pastime for the rich in the late nineteenth century. Various contemporary artists and writers brought back favourable impressions of Tenerife that particularly caught the imagination of the monied English seeking a pleasant place to spend the winter or seek spa treatments. The first widely distributed and well-received guidebook , written by the parochial and opinionated Olivia Stone following a tour of the islands in 1884, was the first of a spate of guides about Tenerife. The most succcessful was a straight-talking little volume packed with practical detail, advice and opinions written by A. Samler Brown who authored fourteen editions of the guide to Tenerife between 1889 and 1932. While interest among the wealthy continued in the period after World War II, it was the introduction of charter flights in the 1950s - nonstop flights to Tenerife beginning in 1959 - that changed the whole structure of the island's tourism. Once limited to a collection of rather exclusive hotels in Puerto de la Cruz, tourist developments spread like wildfire around the island in the 1960s. Attempts at replicating Puerto's success elsewhere began along the north coast, but pretty soon it was realised that what modern holiday-makers were really after was great weather. Before long huge resorts began to mushroom at the southern end of the island, where there had been little more than desert - but which today contains around three-quarters of the island's accommodation. Since its beginnings in the 1960s, mass tourism has continued to boom on the island, despite occasional recessions (particularly in the 1970s) and today Tenerife plays host to around 4.5 million annual holiday-makers - of which around a third are British, a quarter Spanish and a sixth German. The island now owes around two-thirds of its Gross National Product to tourism. Though tourism has proved to be a crucially important money-spinner for the island, providing employment and encouraging a host of otherwise unimaginable infrastructural improvements, the unregulated growth of resorts, together with the hasty concrete extensions to service towns, is beginning to cause some concern. The local abstract artist Cesar Manrique , who also enjoys a degree of international recognition, particularly championed efforts to preserve Canarian culture and architecture from the onslaught of faceless mass tourism. To some extent his campaign has borne fruit, encouraging hotel architects to build in more vernacular styles, but the problems associated with tourism run deeper than this, impacting on the natural environment , where they are harder to regulate or control. They include problems associated with processing waste, sewage treatment, regulating water supplies, providing energy and protecting delicate ecosystems - needs all too often overlooked in the past, in the scramble for easy, short-term financial gains.
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