Is this a tourist attraction?

We have a couple of travel websites, and one of the challenges of operating a tourist site is deciding whether something is a tourist attraction or not, and how ‘honestly’ to paint a picture of a town or attraction.

Of course, everyone tries to be honest, but it’s not always to give a balanced picture. If we visit somewhere on a cloudy November afternoon when it’s raining we are unlikely to come away with the same impression as someone visiting in May, when the sun is shining and you can sit outside your cafe having a drink.

Many places are very pleasant to visit, and we recommend them heartily, but don’t really have any great attractons or monuments – so it’s hard to say very much! So while we try and identify what was nice about a town it is often hard to explain.

On the other hand, some towns are positively littered with historical monuments and places of interest – but also have a lot of unattractive parts in between, or nowhere to sit down etc. These places we end up writing lots of information about…and it’s not very convincing to then seem unenthusiastic!

Yet again, other towns have a small but interesting centre that has since been completely surrounded by urban sprawl. Does this mean you shouldn’t visit the centre? Should we say ‘not really worth the effort to find a parking space’?

And what about places that are perfectly formed but only really take 15 minutes to visit because they are so small? Once when travelling in the USA we travelled half a day to reach somewhere recommended in our guidebooks, only to find it took about 5 minutes to enjoy the (not particularly exceptional) setting and then spend another half a day getting away again. So should we say ‘very nice but don’t come too far to visit’!?

I can think of many villages in south-west France that are very similar sounding when described, but some of which you would want to keep returning to and others you would find completely uninteresting. Identifying exactly why there is this difference is a challenge.

I heard of someone who visited the renowned cave paintings at Font de Gaume in the Dordogne, and came out saying that it was a disappointment because the pictures were so small – they expected wall sized canvases – are they right to be disappointed? Perhaps they are, it is how a place compares with our expectations that matters most maybe – if a village exceeds our expectations we will be pleased.

So perhaps we should always undersell the appeal of a town, so expectations are always exceeded?

To confuse matters further, many of our articles are written for us by volunteers who live in the town concerned, and they will inevitably describe the town in a more or less rosy way than we would ourselves.

All this was brought to mind by the Le Corbusier ‘unite d’habitation’ development in Marseille (which I know from photos and architecture books, but haven’t visited myself). The development is very important from an architectural point of view, and was the forerunner of a great deal of 1960’s building i.e. high rise blocks. but while those with an architects eye will find it interesting, perhaps even beautiful, the majority of visitors, I fear, will have no interest at all in the development and wonder why anyone would include it in a tourist guide.

So just try to remember, it’s not always easy to describe the real pleasure that a town offers when writing tourist guides – so there are many places left to be discovered and enjoyed that don’t feature in the guidebooks, and many that do feature that you will be disappointed with!!