Aren’t guide books wonderful?
Mass tourism is a surprisingly recent development and really only got going with the arrival of cheap package tours in the 1960s. Before that, the common man just hadn’t got the cash to go anywhere more exotic than Blackpool.
All that changed rapidly of course with the arrival of charter flights and the consequent dramatic drop in the prices for foreign holidays. The first place to really benefit in a big way was, of course, southern Spain which at that time was quite a series of fairly poor agricultural communities; not anymore, of course.
In many ways it didn’t really matter what the place you went to was so long as it was sunny and the majority of the early package holidays simply promoted sun, sand and sea as the attraction. With that, there wasn’t much of a need for guidebooks and indeed it was into the 1980s before the main guidebook series really got into their stride.
Today, of course, just about every location in the world has several guidebooks covering it but even as late as 1978 the range was incredibly limited. At that time by far the best for America was the Lets’ Go series, produced by and aimed at the student market because that was the only group that had the time to go on an extended holiday to America at the time. Even in 1980 a trip to America from Europe was definitely in the category of “once in a lifetime” yet nowadays it’s commonplace.
But surely the Internet is better? Not really. The majority of websites that write about a particular place do it in a very sketchy manner compared to the coverage that you’ll get of the same place in a good guidebook. I was very surprised for instance to find that there was no site with decent coverage of Cordoba when writing the article for that for Whole Earth Guide.
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