barcelonahomes.net

Colombia has long been associated with violence, drugs, and death. Until recent years, relatively few leisure travellers included a holiday apartment in Bogota, the country’s capital, in their South American travel itineraries; But a PR campaign, directed by Bogota, seems to have somewhat successfully distanced leisure travellers from the serious realities of the country’s problems.  Now increasing numbers of foreigners arrive just to drink aguardiente, snort llello, and party.

Perhaps helped along by the expanding literary Hay Festival, which now hosts a sister festival in the Colombian city of Cartagena, Colombia has stepped into the tourist mainstream.  Swish holiday accommodation in Bogota and Cartagena, including Cartagena and Bogota apartment rentals as well as swanky hotels and more basic hostels, could vie with their European equivalents.  Columbia’s flourishing tourism industry points to renewed economic confidence, but how many Colombian people benefit?

Not much has changed for the average citizen of Colombia.  A ravaged society has in effect endured over 30 years of civil war, enabled by military aid from North America under the ‘War on Drugs’ smoke screen.  Under President Bush Junior, the cover was officially changed from counter-narcotics to counter-insurgency, or ‘anti-terrorism’, otherwise referred to as ‘internal security’ - meaning war against your own population.

The highly militarised ‘aid programme’ subsidises the North American military and industrial complex, and keeps a pro-Rich World (anti its own population) Colombian establishment firmly in place.  Institutions, meaningful social investment, and effective people and political opposition have been swept clean away.

The law of supply (in the Poor World) and demand (in the Rich World) of course means farmers keep harvesting coca.  Now Bogota accommodation owners are reporting rising numbers of cocaine tourists.  This coarse side of tourism reflects the oligarchy governing Colombia for its own ends.

US contractors carry out the fumigation of so-called illegal crops inside Colombia.  The imprecise aerial fumigation targets the small fish in the drug ocean - the farmers - and is a proven failure in its stated aims a hundred times over.  US chemical companies are commissioned for the production of the harmful defoliants used.

The links between the North American trained military and the paramilitary are irrefutable and long proven including ground communications between them.  Everyone knows they are one and the same, with the paramilitary carrying out the atrocities, the slaughter of civil society people, unhindered.  “An illegal industry of death serves the legal industry of death,” wrote Eduardo Galeano.

The forced exodus of rural people to urban areas frees up strategic lands for foreign investment, as cities become ever overcrowded with the dispossessed masses including the “throw away” street children.

Tourists might mind their money-belts and cameras, step over some hapless vagabond, and avoid completely the least desirable areas.  But, in truth, the visitor knows no comparable risk to the daily risks encountered by the lowest rungs of Colombian society.

Death squads in Colombia call themselves ’social cleaning groups,’ and protect themselves under the legal mask of ’security companies.’  Under contract to the highest bidder - landowners, traders, and the like - they can get rid of any living nuisance, be they adult or child, should they be exacting a negative impact on business.

In the capital of violence, the tourists have Bogota accommodation to go back to, and then they fly away home.   The street children have no such temporary refuge or destination.  Seeking any available hideaway including the darkness of the sewers, they squirrel away their lost childhoods, get high, and hopefully sleep uninterrupted by water, rats, or violence.

Colombia: World-renowned for its coffee, the number one exporter of cocaine despite the War on Drugs and fall of Pablo Escobar, and new best Latin American tourist destination.  Thanks then to the undesirable masses, the heart and lungs of Colombia and our world.  Without them we would be without our relative wealth and the luxuries afforded by it.

With almost seven million leisure travellers arriving in Prague each year, the city has changed out of all recognition compared to the city it was just a decade ago.

First Prague was popular with British hen and stag parties, offering the girls-on-tour and boys-on-their-tour cheap booze, sleazy nightclubs, and accommodation in Prague at its most affordable.

Then came the rise of the so-called ‘New Prague’, which kept popping up in different emerging destinations across the Baltic States.  Best men and maids of honour retuned their aerials to the Best Stag and Hen Weekend Cosmos.  And Prague learned there’s always somewhere cheaper and sleazier.

Contrary to the opinion that city destinations benefit from a rush of boozed up hen or stag tourism, Prague isn’t bitter.

Hen and particularly stag parties aren’t world renowned as tasteful affairs.  They are something of a national embarrassment - being a peculiarly British phenomenon - for many.

On arrival, stag parties normally check into the lowest-end B&Bs or comparable New Prague short-term rental, and they always follow the same dully-predictable pub-crawl performing the same dully-predictable routine of loud and bad behaviour.  Local business in general fails to cash in, and often looses business since other types of tourist stay away.

Today’s Prague is still popular with British stag and hen parties - communal sigh - but less so.  And a different type of tourist does throng the narrow streets, filling chic cafes, bars and restaurants, as well as the numerous Prague holiday apartments and little hotels.  But this in itself doesn’t end or look like it can stop the wave of tacky consumerism sweeping through Prague.

Glittering with a liberal sprinkling of McDonald’s ‘golden arches’, and with all types of Prague accommodation booming, the country is undergoing a process of commercial development and it’s going though the process at a fast rate.

In today’s Prague, the purveyor of the world’s worst coffee, the infamous Starbucks brand, is never far away.  But now the city council has committed a crime too many against culture in favour of bland consumerism: The decision by Prague’s deputy mayor in charge of cultural affairs to slash funding for the non-profit sector is considered not so much right-on as symptomatic of consumerism gone mad.

But the fight is about more than the allocation of subsidies: Campaigners want their representatives in power to wake up before it’s too late.  Nothing less than the city’s soul is at stake.  Traditionally one of the cultural centres of Europe, and considered to be one of Europe’s most beautiful cities, Prague, they rightly say, is a treasure worth keeping - more or less just the way it is.

This is not to say Prague shouldn’t develop, economically, socially, architecturally, and the rest of it.  But rather the development on the ground should be in harmony with the geography and style of the place, and the growth of the pot should feed the community, not just Prague apartment and hotel owners, and owners of other local and international business.

Of all its consequences on the ground, the homogeneity consumerism spreads is the most numbingly uninspiring.  Soon everywhere will adopt the same cardboard look and feel, so you may as well just stay at home.

During the 1990s property boom, large parts of Spain’s Mediterranean coastline were concreted over.  Fuelled by an unrelenting and in large part British appetite for holidays and accommodation in the Costa del Sol and other fashionable coastal areas, thousands of homes and short term apartment rental buildings were built on protected land.  Now the national government and environmental groups want to roll in the bulldozers.

Playground for the rich and formerly most sought after area to buy property, Marbella in the Costa del Sol has faced the most corruption and planning scandals.  Thousands of homeowners continue to battle the threat of demolition of their Costa del Sol apartment, house, or, in the case of Antonio Banderas, 300sq ft wing of a beachside property.

This equality of opportunity, however, has done little to placate property owners who complain it’s unfair to apply the law retrospectively.  In the aftermath of the threat of demolition, many developers have stopped promoting Costa del Sol accommodation to the scared off British market completely.

Then in March 2008, a court ruling claimed 22 Lanzarote hotels were built illegally.  Are none of Spain’s concrete jungles safe?  Perhaps not, such was the neglect to consider local including ecological factors in the race to acquire coastal land - all of it - for Costa del Sol apartment blocks.

British and other Rich World immigrants and holidaymakers have in this way had a detrimental impact on local communities and habitats in Spain.   Local people have been priced out of local housing markets, and swathes of previously unspoilt coastline have been hijacked, and seeded some pretty beastly developments - often tower block constructions - on beachfront land.

Spread thick like butter, high-rise resorts and settlements - each one packed with Costa del Sol apartments for rent or sale - dominate the coastline.  It’s hard then to imagine this region in the south of Spain, as it was only a few decades ago.

Before the onslaught of urbanisation, starting in the 1950s to meet the demands of tourism, the Costa del Sol was a string of fishing villages.  But rural Spain is still there, beautiful and unspoilt in the mountains running down to the coast - just a little inland.

Near but far away from the business of Costa del Sol holiday apartment rental, restaurants with picture-board menus, and bars frequented by hordes of bleary eyed, pink foreigners, you are at once at home in your mind again.

Andalusia is rich with white villages, and national parks.  And if you chance upon a bullfight, up high on the screen in some locals’ bar, you might wonder if the matador has time to prove their worth before the bull figures out the game and thrusts horns at the person behind the cape.

If the bulls and bulldozers are about to deliver a fateful blow, it might have been better to have never been there, but best get out of the way.  One thing’s for sure, wake up calls are never easy.

Accommodation Granada - Dome Sweet Dome

As far as funky accommodation in Granada or indeed anywhere goes, Alhambra - ‘the red one’ - is pretty fabulous.  Once the home of Muslim kings, Alhambra is now a tourist attraction and reminder of the debt Spanish and European culture and heritage owes to Islamic civilisation.

Alhambra was completed in the fourteenth century, at the height of Muslim intellectual, social and economic dominance, in the midst of Europe’s Dark Age.  It’s one of the most complete Islamic palaces in the world today; and in its day Alhambra would have been alive with the vibrancy of colour and sound.

Isbabella I of Castille and Ferdinand II of Aragon, whose marriage united the two most powerful Catholic dynasties of that time and paved the way to a unified Spain, are buried there.   They solicited the Pope to authorise the Spanish Inquisition, and conjured the end of the incredible society and Golden Age created when a progressive society crossed the Gibraltar Straits.

When the Inquisition arrived in Granada, Muslims were separated from the rest of the population.  Much of the Granada accommodation the Muslims were forced out of remains into today.  These are beautiful buildings with internal courtyards at their heart - at the centre of family life.  If you book a Granada short-term rental for your trip to Spain, you’d be lucky to stay in one of these traditional Muslim homes.

In the end, the Inquisition was so brutally efficient as to cause all Muslims in Spain to convert to Catholicism within a twenty-year period. As many as 1,000,000 Arabic books were burned, and over 300,000 people were expelled from the country. The persecuted were as Iberian as their persecutors, but the effort to erase 700 years of history was absolute, and has been ongoing, in quieter ways, since.

Whether for Alhambra Hay Festival, Alhambra itself, free tapas, flamenco dancing, the Sierra Nevada mountains, or cave house apartments in Granada, which are dug into the hillside, leisure travellers should understand then something of the history that links two cultures in ways only beginning to be understood.

When the Muslims arrived in Europe they saw tyranny rife in a land laid vulnerable and unprotected in the power vacuum left by the collapse of Rome.  Evidence suggests the invaders were largely welcomed, sometimes as saviours, with treaties pointing to the free exchange of land for protection.  Such were the advantages of this new civilisation, Spain’s indigenous population converted to Islam in droves.

The Muslims brought with them social structure and sophisticated knowledge including cutting-edge technology for irrigation, transforming the Spanish landscape, and a sophisticated trade network that enabled this new agriculture to create huge wealth.  Spain had never before known the lemon and orange groves so associated with it today.

The Muslims introduced to Europe running water, sewerage works, the concept of land rental, an organised legal system, and even paper, a revolutionary technology that changed the face of Europe. Even Europe’s literature has been directly influenced, through the transfer of knowledge from Muslim Spain to the troubadours of France.

In the end Alhambra’s overwhelming beauty is less about frivolous and lustrous aesthetics as the mathematical ingenuity behind its geometry, which creates a sense of overwhelming calm.  Nor was there anything superficial about 700 years of Muslim Spain, or the inheritance it left to today’s Europeans.  Nor should there be anything superficial about the modern-day visitor’s stay in modern-day Granada - in a holiday apartment and other short term apartment rental in this famed beautiful destination - for there are necessary truths to encounter.