Dark tourism – traveling to places that are associated with tragedy and death – has become incredibly popular. According to Kiwi.com, bookings to the nuclear disaster site at Chernobyl have gone up 1,200% in the past 6 years and visitors to Cambodia’s killing fields have tripled. While some people like to sit by the pool on their vacation, reading a book and sipping a cocktail, others are heading to Auschwitz to see the gas chambers. But what is motivating us to visit these places with such a dark and disturbed history, and is it a good thing?
A dark history
It is a well known fact that humankind has an obsession with death. The Romans delighted in watching the gladiators dispatch one another at The Coliseum, and there was nothing that the French aristocracy enjoyed more than a grisly guillotine execution. We’ve had a deep connection with the end of life since time began and nothing has really changed. We still want to explore the places where people have died, and try to gain an understanding of what may happen to us when we too shuffle off this mortal coil.
Understanding the past
For many people, visiting sites of tragedies is an essential part of learning about our history. Places like the Culloden battlefield and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park are a painful reminder of how fragile life is, and how important it is to learn from our mistakes. There is a fine line however, between this and going on a Jack the Ripper tour to enjoy stories of gratuitous, seemingly irrational violence and the abuse of women.
Tasteful tourism
There are some major ethical questions that arise out of the issue of dark tourism. Many of the sites, including the Cambodian killing fields, the Normandy beaches and Auschwitz are deeply serious places where the friends and family of their loved ones are trying to pay tribute. Should this be exploited as a tourist attraction just to make money? It is clear however, that where there is a profit to be made, the matter of taste and tact are of least importance. There is also the issue of how a dark tourism site is presented. You can enjoy a visit to Alcatraz, sit in one of the cells and have your picture taken for Instagram, but you may not learn about the injustice and brutality of mass incarceration.
There continues to be a growing trend for dark tourism, and it is in so many ways desperately important to learn about history and what makes us human. It is down to the individual though to consider what is respectful when visiting sites of extreme tragedy.