The reality behind the view, however, is somewhat different. The peaks are there, all right; the meadow is indeed beautiful, the lake is crystalline. But a visitor to Alpe di Siuse or Lago di Braies will have to contend with some of the largest crowds of tourists in Europe; a staggering 34 million people a year. If you yearn for a solitary communing with nature, you will find many, many others have had the same idea.

Now the local population of the region of Trentino Alto Adige, which amounts to only a million people, have had enough. This summer, the local tourist board has instigated a cap on visitor numbers, and between July and September, anyone wanting to come in by car will need an online permit. Entry to the meadow will be restricted to the hours between 9am and 5pm, and to the lake between 9am and 4pm. It will put paid to getting your own Insta-breaking shot of the sunset over the mountains. Bureaucracy has stepped in to keep the romantic touristic ideal alive.

“Over-tourism” is killing — in some cases, has long since killed — what tourists think they seek: the sightseeing industry has become a snake compelled to eat its own tail. Venice, now simply a palimpsest of a real, living city, charges an entrance fee to day-trippers, because they add to the stifling crush of people but less to the economy that overnighters.

Sooner or later, any place advertised as “unspoilt” must buckle under the weight of visitors looking for unspoiltness. On the once-mysterious island of Santorini, the coast road is crammed, nose to tail, with coaches full of cruise passengers who’ve disembarked for a couple of hours. The clifftop over the caldera is blocked three-deep with tourists taking selfies at sunset. Wedding parties queue to get photographs with the view behind them. It feels less like a place than a backdrop.

In France, which attracts 90 million tourists a year (the highest number of any country in Europe), regional tourist boards have now resorted to begging visitors to stay away from the obvious and over-stuffed destinations, such as Mont-Saint-Michel, and spread the load of numbers to lesser-known routes. Pressures of infrastructure, of water, health services and traffic make once-lovely places often disappointing for the holidaymaker (so very unlike the promise of those Insta images) and both impossible and expensive for the people who must actually make a home there.

Barcelona — at 15,800 inhabitants per square kilometre, already one of the most crowded cities in Europe — attracts 32 million visitors every year. (In 1990, there were 1.8 million.) Half this number are day-trippers who spend their money only in the main tourist areas and souvenir stalls, while the proliferation of Airbnb apartments drives up local rents and forces locals out of the centre.

Few people seek out crowds when travelling. The tourist experience is almost always characterised by those selling it in terms of exclusivity, serendipity and particularity. The beach is “tucked away”, the restaurant is “local”, and in the guidebook the cathedral appears to be empty but for a discerning few. The reality, however, is that the beach is generally crammed, as is the restaurant, which is also vastly expensive — and for the cathedral, you must queue round the block for entry.

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Modern tourism has long been a battlefield between the competing desires of individual and collective experience. In 1861, a Times leader denounced what it viewed as the modern craze for “rushing about in crowds”, which it found was represented by the tours of Thomas Cook. Cook’s answer was that tourism had for too long been the preserve of a “flirting, listless” aristocratic elite; he was opening up the world for the education of the middle classes, for the “thoughtful tourist”. Where people of leisure merely “wandered” about, Cook’s clients were working people wishing to use their short periods of time off in a guided, directed manner. They wanted to be pointed to what was “good” and what was “beautiful” and to learn about it. They wanted to have experiences.

But with everyone looking for a view or an experience, before long, the view and the experience were inevitably made less attractive by other people. Those who thought they had a majestic landscape to themselves were outraged. In 1867, Minnie Thackeray, daughter of the novelist, deplored the sight of the “trippers and excursionists” flocking to Mont Blanc (which now gets 6 million visitors a year). Ruskin, whose dislike of “fast travel” was intense, thought that the inhabitants of the mountain village of Chamonix were degraded by turning their woodworking skills to making ornamental alpenstocks to sell to tourists.

A century later, in the Sixties — the period that saw cheap air travel bring unprecedented numbers to the Mediterranean and transform small fishing villages into vast resorts — anthropologists first used the phrase the “tourist gaze”. This gaze had had a profound effect on communities whose craft traditions and religious ceremonies were now simply part of a package of attractions served up to seasonal visitors. Had these traditions become mere husks, empty of meaning? Were they now understood in terms not of their own deep roots within landscape and history, but only in relation to an audience fleetingly interested in a bit of local colour?

The first tourists were medieval pilgrims for whom the outer journey had an inner, spiritual purpose. But modern tourists who encounter religious festivals abroad often don’t share or understand the deeper significance of what they are witnessing. Smartphone images constitute the 21st-century equivalent of an 18th-century cabinet of curiosities. It is a pic-n-mix assortment of cultural bits and pieces to be stored and (perhaps) looked at long after the moment in which the original was experienced.

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Ruskin was a snob about travel. He saw no reason why he shouldn’t himself travel slowly in his own coach about Europe (he deplored trains, which he saw as inculcating the peculiarly modern vice of endless distraction), as long as he didn’t have to suffer the presence of crowds of his less-cultured countrymen. But his warning of tourism’s endless and inevitable roll-out of blandness and standardisation seems prophetic and pertinent today. For Ruskin, always to be moving somewhere else, always planning a destination far away, was to risk missing the details of where we actually are. In the search for difference or novelty (that view over the mountains; that bluer sea; that Instagrammable seafood feast), we bypass the deeper pleasure of looking more intimately at what is close and familiar.

In his 2002 book The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton points out that to sketch a tree would take at least “10 minutes of acute concentration”, a length of time that would rarely be given to any examination of a tree in the age of the smartphone. Like Ruskin an advocate of slow travel, de Botton also glosses over the fact that attending to the details of your own locality is a lot easier if you live somewhere even just a bit lovely — and it may be that the more we rely on going somewhere else for loveliness, we risk neglecting to respect the places that we live in.

But as the high spots of popular destinations become more crowded with people and more emptied of atmosphere, perhaps it’s time to re-think what it means to be a tourist — to try and pin down what it is the tourist really hungers for. The tourism industry is a product of 19th-century Romanticism, perhaps its most visible living legacy. It is ever on the lookout for new ways either to re-package the sites of the past or to sell the sensation of a wonder that has often long since been jaded by exposure.

Among its commodities are “heritage” and “experience” — both of which have to be carefully curated to maintain the appearance most likely to evoke feelings of the sublime. But the localism, the crafts, customs, and food, which is also central to the tourists’ sensation package is meaningless if there are no real locals to embody it. Keeping tourists out may give communities space to recover themselves. In the spirit of Ruskin in making travel a little more challenging, a little slower, it may encourage a resurgence in the art of really looking. More importantly, it should encourage an examination of what tourism means for places so buckling under the strain of numbers that, for their inhabitants, they are no longer places for living, working and being, but simply for propping up an unsustainable artifice.

By 1931, there was an air service with two daily flights to Palma from mainland Spain and another from Marseilles. According to the 1933 Lindo guide, the journey from London, by air with two stopovers, now took less than 48 hours — even though at the airport, even in the Fifties, passengers’ luggage was still collected by horse and cart and taken to their hotel. By 1935, with 135 hotels on the island, 71 of them in Palma, the number of tourists had more than doubled: there were 40,000 hotel stays and 50,000 cruise visitors.

The poet Robert Graves, Majorca’s most famous British resident, looked on with dismay from his eyrie in the village of Deià. “About 1931, a small tourist boom began, which troubled me despite such advantages as being now able to buy in Palma cow’s milk, beef, butter, teapots, kettles, beer and ready-made sheets, none of which had hitherto been procurable,” he wrote. When Graves had moved to Deià in 1929, there was already a small colony of British exiles in El Terreno, in flight from thrifty budgeting and rain, and he described them as “retired civil servants from Asian and African dependencies, who had not dared face either the English climate or the high cost of domestic help at home”.

By the time Robert Trimnell set out the island delights in his first guide to Palma in 1955, it had become host to a new style of post-war middle-class English expatriatism: easy-going, blazer-wearing, louche but resolutely unbohemian. It was boozy and jovial, at ease with a bit of undemanding culture but more at home on the golf course: retirement in the sun with every amenity.

Air travel meant saving time. And on a beach holiday that was time saved to do nothing. There was very little that was educative or high-minded about the new kind of holiday — no jolly character-building while roughing it or tramping over the hills singing “Strawberry Fair”. The new beach holiday meant doing nothing but basking and getting a tan, perhaps a little swimming, and certainly a lot of eating and drinking.

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By this time tourists didn’t even have to make do with just Majorcan culture: there was a wide range of other cultures on tap. In the 1964 edition of the guide, Trimnell notes that in Palma you can buy Italian silk ties and Pringle jumpers; you can “drink your draught beer in a bullring” in the El Toro bullfighter-themed bar. And then there was the South African-owned “Africa Bar” where, in a typical bit of touristic cultural dissonance, you can eat “the best pizza, spaghetti, lasagne and Italian salads in town”.

Trimnell’s Palma is a theme park of pseudo-Balearic experience carefully tailored to feel, with its hair salons, pubs and golf courses, almost like home — but cheaper, boozier and warmer. In this enclosed world, everything is provided, and little demanded of the tourist except ready cash.

Graves was as much enamoured of the simple living and sun-engendered spontaneity as any bohemian creative of the Twenties. But in the post-war years, he found the Majorcan beaches increasingly debased by rows of passive sun-tanners. Graves reflected that they had no idea that it was really all about sex:

“The average emancipated Englishwoman associates the Sun with an idyll of lying scantily clad on a nice hot sandy beach, while a bronzed lover — and incarnation of the Sun — mutters fiery and unintelligible endearments in her chaste ear. Probably she has been reading that crazy D. H. Lawrence, England’s most fanatical Sun-cult revivalist.”

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The sun by then was seen not only as a natural source of health but as a craving, an adulation: it was associated with freedom and uncomplicated sex and natural physical urges. D. H. Lawrence was naturally a keen proponent of this idea. In his 1925 short story Sun, a woman sunbathing on a remote Mediterranean promontory, under doctor’s orders, feels that the rays of the sun are “mating” with her:

“She slid off all her clothes and lay naked in the sun. As she lay she looked up through her fingers at the central sun, his blue, pulsing roundness, whose outer edges streamed brilliance. Pulsing with marvellous blue, and alive, and streaming white fire from his edges, the sun! He faced down to her with his look of blue fire, and enveloped her breasts and her face, her throat, her tired belly, her knees, her thighs and her feet.”

The novelty of all-inclusive holidays in the sun, devoid of any expectations of culture, made acceptable the notion of two weeks of self-indulgence and pure enjoyment. Respectable mores could be left behind on a package holiday, where the sexes mingled freely on the beach in revealing bathing costumes. The all-you-can-eat buffets were an almost unimaginable luxury after rationing. The heat, the swimming, and exotic food were part of the experience, but for tourists coming from an urbanised, industrialised Britain, it was also deliriously romantic and mind-expanding.

By 1953, two million British a year were holidaying abroad — half a century later, in 2000, the figure would be 30 million. In 1938, the Holidays with Pay Act had mandated a week’s paid annual leave for all industrial workers. Wages had gone up sharply during the post-war labour shortages: average weekly earnings between 1955 and 1960 rose by 34%.

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In many places, notably Franco’s Spain, cultural clashes were inevitable. The distinctiveness of ordinary life was made artificial by being constantly watched and photographed — or was simply erased. The nature of the traditional evening paseo in Spain, for example, when the local young men and women dress up and walk out to view each other, was altered by the presence of British and German tourists wearing skimpier clothes. In the early Fifties women exposing too much flesh (bathing costumes had to have skirts) were sent home by the Guardia Civil. Robert Graves’s daughter Lucia went to school in England in early Fifties; when she left Majorca, the local girls were kept strictly at home until they became mothers but on her return a few years later she was amazed to see that under the influence of the tourists, they were now out on the beach wearing tiny bikinis.

Graves saw “real” Majorca collapsing under the weight of the incoming crowd, with its chatter, its megaphones and its loud motor vehicles. He saw the destruction of baraka, the “spirit of generations, of place and inheritance and custom but also of kneeling, of divine inspiration, lightning rapture”. Something “real” was being swamped by its own shadow — unreal tat simulating real craftsmanship: fake “gypsies” playing flamenco in bars and “bullfighting posters on which tourists could have their own names printed between those of El Litri and Jaime Ostos”.

By the Seventies, the uniformity of the sun, sea and sand package-tour experience had become a ubiquitous shorthand for uncultured jollification. In the Carry On films, Spain was seen as simply a sunny backdrop against which a motley group of merry British can shed their sexual inhibitions until it’s time to go home. Carry on Abroad (1972) is set on the island resort of “Elsbels”. Spanish women are frighteningly seductive and Spanish men (mostly waiters) wickedly predatory. “Steady on chaps,” say the Brits as they succumb (temporarily). Inhibitions are happily shed behind coy “do not disturb” signs and, at the end of the holiday, the coach returns everyone home to Britain — there to dream of the same thing, same time next year.

Extracted from Tourists: How the British Went Abroad to Find Themselves by Lucy Lethbridge, Bloomsbury

Smith’s most celebrated panorama relived his ascent of Mont Blanc in 1851 — which had been an astonishing physical feat for a clubbable bon viveur (though he had to be dragged to the summit barely conscious, he claimed to have celebrated by drinking a bottle of champagne and smoking a cigar). He pulled out all the stops to recreate Mont Blanc on the stage of the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly in 1852, importing woodcarvers from Chamonix to recreate a Swiss chalet. St Bernards roamed the aisles and during the interval hot baked potatoes were dispensed for those in the audience feeling a glacial chill from the buckets of cold water placed around the hall. The stage was decked with alpine plants; there was a waterfall with real water, a mill wheel and a lily pond; the walls of the theatre were hung with chamois skins. “The Ascent of Mont Blanc” ran for six years and 2,000 performances, and on top of the fortune he made in ticket sales, Smith cannily expanded his repertoire by selling colouring books, fans, board games and miniature models of Mont Blanc.

Smith, an unrepentant populist (he liked to shock Thackeray by saying that Shakespeare was “all rot”), knocked the high culture out of the touristic experience. He made the adventure of foreign parts bite-sized and accessible — if not in reality, at least in dreams. He called it “the Alps in a box”. Figuratively speaking, Smith’s panoramas boxed up the great sights of the classical Grand Tour and sold them in miniature form, building them up with a dramatic flourish then cutting them down to size with a knowing dig in the ribs. Smith’s success runs parallel with the emergence of photography, the industrial manufacture of souvenirs, and the “I was here” frame of the postcard. After Smith, it became possible to think of “buying” the travel experience without actually going very far, framing it, and taking it home with you. Antiquarian high-culturists looked for quiddity and oddity when abroad but Smith encouraged a joyful appetite for mass-produced kitsch. His own apartment off Tottenham Court was a riot of knick-knackery from his travels. There was a figure of a Swiss peasant with a clock-face in his waistcoat, Venetian glasses, miniature Swiss chalets, soap from Vienna in the shape of fruit and a working model of a guillotine.

The tourist boom in Chamonix inspired by Smith was viewed with horror by those who thought the mountain were theirs to command. Ruskin found the “white leprosy of hotels” and souvenir shops that followed the visitors into the Alps was a blasphemy against “all the deep and sacred sensations of nature”. Everywhere the new tourists went, reported a journalist in 1856, they brought with them “Cockneyism, Albert Smithery, fun, frolic and vulgarity”. The rise in popular tourism to Europe, sparked most importantly by Thomas Cook, had highlighted a divide which has characterised British travelling ever since. In this paradigm, the tourist is the new bug and the traveller is the old soul. And even when they are gazing at the same view, the latter thinks the former is spoiling the view. The distaste is notable in how often crowds of tourists were, and still are, described in terms of mindless cattle or insects — they come in “herds” and “swarms” and “flocks”.

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Naturally as most people like to think they are an old soul, the tourist, as Evelyn Waugh put it, “is the other fellow”. Wherever the crowd goes, it is sure to be perceived by those in another crowd to debase the special spirit of place. Quite what the original spirit of place is often hard to define, but traditionally the British tourist thinks that their fellow countrymen are trampling on it. Newlywed Emily Birchall in 1870 found her visit to St Peter’s ruined by the sight of a British tourist reading his guidebook under the high altar and one feels her pain. The more expensive and bespoke the tourist experience, the more it will sell itself as being particular and unconventional, off the beaten track, away from the throng; until the throng reaches Easter Island or Lapland or Everest. Which of course it almost always does.

Thomas Cook, progenitor of the modern package tour, was a much more serious character than Smith, a former printer and temperance campaigner whose package tour business started as an effort to keep working men away from the pub on the holidays (more properly known as holy days) that constituted their only days off. By the time Smith had conquered Mont Blanc, Cook had been running tours to the Continent for several years. He had become used to the jibes about “Cooks’ Tourists” with their aspirational itineraries and their guidebooks, with points of interest rated by stars or exclamation marks. But Cook was proud of his groups and of what he was introducing to people unaccustomed to travel. “Practical people from the provinces and representatives of the better style of the London mercantile community” is how he described his tourists and he loved them. And they loved him too — a Thomas Cook tour became a byword for trustworthiness and paternal consideration. What Cook offered was something new: the holiday as a collective as well as an individual experience. And it brought with it all the expansions and limitations of the group itself.

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From Lawrence Sterne’s fastidiously risk-averse Dr Smelfungus to a coach tour of larky cockneys in Carry on Abroad, the humour that can be squeezed out of the comical figure of the Brit abroad still seems inexhaustible. One of Albert Smith’s many insights was that tourists like laughing at their fellow countrymen. The ingénue, the know-nothing, the stuck-up type, the travel bore, the vulgarian and the gullible lady traveller all make appearances. They were a satirical speciality of comic novelists like Thomas Moore (The Fudge Family in Paris) and Thackeray (The Kickleburys on the Rhine). The one defining feature is that the reader does not recognise herself in these hopeless embarrassments: they are other ones, the noisy passengers in the overcrowded night train or the ones (snigger) demanding a cup of tea in bad French. Those for whom maintaining social distinctions was important have found plenty to criticise in their fellow tourists but increasingly, others were delighted by the general flattening of class signifiers. By the Thirties, a passenger on a cruise noted: “The thing about cruising is that everyone is dressed in the same kind of light and bright clothing, and so you cannot tell the dukes from the dustmen.”

In the end most people, it appears to me, are after the same thing. British tourists of all types are surely at heart seeking a slice of pastoral, however mass-produced it might be in reality. It doesn’t seem to matter how inauthentic the peasant culture or the artisanal breakfast may be, for tourism simultaneously kills and preserves the thing it seeks. Even the hermetically-sealed world of the beach resort offers its own version of a lost arcadia. So what if the price of arcadia is other people?