The adjective "tourist" in all its numbers and genders for a good concordance is the classic epithet for Cross port. Achilles, the one with light feet, Hector, killer of men, Odysseus, prolific in tricks, Puerto de la Cruz, tourist city, all have their reason. Scholars of history and literature have already stopped at the first; in the last one we will extend ourselves, with greater or lesser fortune, throughout this post.
From the outset, let us clarify that the choice of the previous examples is not trivial, nor is it the result of the obsession with the classic of the person who writes this. Since the Port is a port, it has been a receiving city for visitors, in fact, it was here that the first tourists who set foot on the archipelago arrived: as of 1880, tourism begins to have an important weight in the local economy, which is formalized with the construction of the Gran Hotel Taoro in the last years of the century, becoming the flagship of the beginnings of tourism in Puerto de la Cruz, although the authentic tourist boom could be established between the 50s and 80s of the 20th century: it was in the 60s when it became the most important tourist city in the Canary Islands and the hotel and service sector became the predominant occupations of the inhabitants of the port.
This, which could be the story of any tourist city in any area of any Mediterranean country, has its own peculiarities (the others will have them too, but we don't know them, excuse us). Cross port it was still a small fishing town, whose hotel centers had been created from the remodeling of old family houses. The arrival of tourists influences but does not change excessively the idiosyncrasy of a city accustomed to receiving visitors of all kinds on its coast and these visitors, in turn, seem to be infected with the spirit that Puerto de la Cruz has. It was always, and we believe that this is one of the keys, horizontal tourism, a visitor who becomes a citizen more than a guestAt least during your stay. A “citizenship” that comes to be like love, that is eternal while it lasts, but that, decades later, turns out to be the ideal tourist model, coveted and theorized by destinations that knew how to ride the wave of the tourist boom of the sixties but, perhaps, they did not know how to ride it.
Puerto de la Cruz, in favor of tourism, may have modified its physique, part of its architecture in that unstoppable wave that was the boom in the sixties of the last century, but its idiosyncrasy was unbreakable. Distinguished visitors attest to this spirit of which we speak, artists and intellectuals who, choosing the city perhaps as a retreat for a couple of days, extended their stay and became residents of the city. They passed through the Port, yes, but the Port, inevitably, also passed through them.
And, years later, it remains firm in its character, Puerto de la Cruz setting a trend in cultural tourism. Far from being a tourist ghetto, the city prides itself on an enriching coexistence between natives and foreigners, a relationship between equals in which the two parties grow and evolve together. Maybe that is no longer tourism, but something else. The things of Puerto de la Cruz.
