Even the Icelandic “collapse,” as Bloomberg described it, seems to be more of a pause Wow Air plans to relaunch late this year. In terms of creating new tourists, developing countries are growing the fastest. There are more tourists now than ever before: The World Tourism Organization counted 1.4 billion international tourists in 2018 and predicts 1.8 billion by 2030. From the visitor’s side, overtourism is also a subjective concern based on a feeling: It’s the point at which your personal narrative of unique experience is broken, the point at which there are too many people - like yourself - who don’t belong in a place. It poses tourists as foreign entities to a place in the same way that viruses are foreign to the human body. The stigma of overtourism is contingent on the sense that a place without as many tourists is more real, more authentic, than it is with them. While traveling in Iceland this spring to talk to Icelanders about the boom and subsequent slowdown, however, I began to doubt the concept of overtourism itself. There are both too many tourists and not enough Wow Air, one of the major conduits of Icelandic tourism, declared bankruptcy in March after an unsustainable expansion. In 2017, 42 percent of the country’s export revenue was tourism, meaning that Iceland’s biggest product, larger than its fishing and aluminum industries, is itself. There’s a sense that the tourists took all the Instagrams of waterfalls and glaciers they wanted and then left, leaving the Icelandic economy vulnerable.
From 2013 to 2017 the country saw tourist numbers rising more than 20 percent annually, but in 2018 and for projections into the near future, it looks more like 5 percent. Popular tourist destination Geysir is actually a collection of several different geysers that periodically erupt to cheers from the rings of tourists trying to snap photographs and selfies.
Since the Skift article, the term has been widely applied to places like Barcelona, Venice, and Tulum to suggest that no one who’s in the know would want to go there anymore. “The early-adopter travelers are already onto the next cool, cheap, relatively intact place,” Sheivachman says. Overtourism also comes with a kind of stigma signified by that word “mainstream.” A reputation for excessive crowds means the tastemaking travel elite actually start avoiding a place, like a too-popular restaurant. Tourists have flooded the island, crashing their camper vans in the wilderness, pooping in the streets of Reykjavik, and eroding the scenic canyon Fjaðrárgljúfur, where Justin Bieber shot a music video in 2015, forcing it to close temporarily. In other words, Sheivachman says, “a place becomes mainstream.” Iceland has about 300,000 residents, but it received more than 2.3 million overnight visitors last year. Places like Perlan - magnets for visitors and secondary representations of the country’s natural charms - are increasingly a necessity for Iceland, which in recent years has become synonymous with the term “overtourism.” Overtourism is what happens to a place when an avalanche of tourists “changes the quality of life for people who actually live there,” says Andrew Sheivachman, an editor at the travel website Skift, whose 2016 report about Iceland established the term. The digital image might be clearer than reality. The screen’s pixel density is so high that it runs up against the limits of what the human eye can perceive. Every hour on the hour the planetarium plays Áróra, a 22-minute-long documentary with footage of the lights taken from all over Iceland. on an 8K resolution screen inside a well-heated IMAX planetarium at Perlan, a natural history museum set on a hill above downtown Reykjavik. These northern lights are glowing at 1 p.m. The bands of color appear right above me, like I could reach out and pass my hand through them.
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Leaning back in my recliner, I gaze upward at the ethereal reds, greens, and blues arcing across the sky, wavering like alien signals, an extraterrestrial message that we don’t know how to decode.
You don’t have to ride a snowmobile into the mountains or rent a glass-roofed igloo. There’s a place in Iceland where you can see the northern lights any time of year, regardless of the weather.