Tourism and Landscape

“Embodied” tourist practices, that is, the active movement of walkers, hikers, and mountaineers through space, created a new sensitivity for nature and landscape when spreading in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, during the period of European romanticism. As the examples of the Rhine Valley and Switzerland illustrate, the practice of pedestrian exploration of marginal spaces created particularly powerful imageries of landscapes, inviting individuals to either reenact similar experiences in the same environment or to engage with it during their own explorations elsewhere. The spread of tourism in the northern hemisphere, the practice of both individual and collective hiking and the imaginary of landscapes they produced were instrumental in projecting a nation onto the natural environment and in carving out national territories and identities throughout the course of the nineteenth century.