What can we do to make our holidays really sustainable?
Although the public administrations should play an important regulatory role, we, as citizens, must take the first step towards making our holidays less harmful for the environment, by making the right decisions.
We talked to Miguel del Reguero, a biologist who specialises in ecotourism and environmental education, to ask him what our goals are in order to enjoy some ecologically responsible holidays.
In his opinion, the first factor to be taken into account is the distance covered to reach the destination. “In the same way that the best chefs prepare their dishes with zero kilometre products, we must start to talk about one or two thousand kilometre holidays. We don’t have to discover the world on foot, as proposed by Unamuno, but we should realise that to be happy when travelling, we don’t have to go very far away,” he indicates.
Del Reguero points out that there are people who have become “collectors of exotic landscapes or of countries that are in situations of risk, and on the other hand, do not enjoy a setting such as ours, where we have almost everything on hand and that they can reach by train or public transport.” At the same time, mass tourism has meant that there are territories “such as the entire coast, from Catalonia to Andalusia, which have been ecologically damaged in a virtually irreversible way.”
Del Reguero defends the quality of our landscape, but in order to conserve it, the public administrations must regulate the load capacity of these places in both time and space. This is particularly important in our country, given that 12.8% of the GDP in 2023 came from the tourism sector. “Today we have seventeen different models of tourism regulations for the seventeen autonomous regions,” he tells us. “This means that there are national parks, for example, that have conserved their biodiversity very well and others such as the Tablas de Daimiel that have reached a more concerning situation.”
