There’s a little town on a rise above the fjord in East Greenland. Ittoqqortoormiit. It means the place with the big houses in East Greenlandic. The only community on nearly 10,000 kilometers of coastline (6,200 miles). Three to four hundred people live here. Five to seven hundred visitors show up every year. I was one of them.

Out of Reykjavik on a private charter, we flew into Nerlerit Inaat, the airport thirty-seven kilometers up the coast. It’s a red and white metal building on barren terrain, mountains behind. Two portable toilets sat outside, strapped down to pallets. There was no plumbed sewer. Waste went into bags. When the bags filled, they got buried.

I sailed on a schooner called the Opal. She was anchored off the coast. An easy Zodiac ride from shore to ship.

Sailing from Nerlerit Inaat toward Ittoqqortoormiit, we passed an abandoned village. A Danish colony started in 1925, the same time as Ittoqqortoormiit. The last residents of the now ghost town moved out in 2005. Some of the houses were still painted red and green and gray. Others had been bleached bare by the sun, weather, and time.

At Ittoqqortoormiit, we put on lifejackets and hopped in the Zodiac bound for the town dock. The first thing that caught my eye was a seal tied off to the dock and floating in the water. Deboned, maybe, or the skin preserving in salt. Seals are one of the animals I love. I recoiled.

The houses climbed the rise in front of us. Red, purple, green, dark blue, painted against a canvas of stark bare rock, patches of snow on the ridges, and dark water below. Pitched black roofs. Each plot with enough land for a snowmobile, a dog sled, a pickup, a motorcycle. No cul-de-sacs, dirt roads. Just above freezing temps, under a sky that could have been any hour. August at this latitude gives you twenty hours of daylight and no way to know the time without a watch.

The town was quiet. A generator humming somewhere. An ATV passing, a truck, then someone on a motorcycle. Once in a while a dog barking. No throngs of people. The few I saw paid me no mind. I paid them the same.

A creek ran through the middle of town, narrow in August and probably a wide river when the glaciers melt in spring. Along the bank, sled dogs were chained near silver food bowls knocked around in the dirt. Some sleeping on the cold ground. Some milling about. Empty dog sleds tipped over. Puppies running loose. Our guide told us not to pet them. If a visitor touched one, it would have to be put down. These were work animals, not furry companions. I’ve worked in animal welfare, and standing on that bridge looking down at the dogs was tough. You have to set that aside and take in the whole picture.

Polar bear pelts hung over wooden racks built onto the sides of houses. Some on porch railings. Whole hides, trimmed. Musk ox hides drying alongside them, shaggy and dark brown. Bear skulls mounted outside a couple of the houses. Laundry drying outside.

The tourist center was two rooms. There was an old man just inside the door, his face carved by the sun, weather, and time. A woman at the desk selling a few postcards, sealskin mittens, polar bear boots. Our guide said not to buy polar bear items. Customs in our home countries would most likely confiscate them. I bought a Christmas ornament made of sealskin. Small enough to pack. There were no Greenland t-shirts, no keychains, no coffee mugs. Nothing designed for the passing tourist.

Someone had to be sent to unlock the office where our passports could be stamped. The office was on a side road. Nobody was required to have their passport stamped in Ittoqqortoormiit. The stamp was our souvenir.

The grocery store sat in the middle of town. Small building, no windows, no signage, a dirt parking lot out front. It looked like a little warehouse, or a PX on a military base. The town gets deliveries twice a year. Once in July. Again in September, before the ice closes the fjord to cargo ships until the following summer. In between, the shelves go bare. Hunters go out onto the sea ice.

I didn’t go in.

I lived in a town where groceries didn’t come regularly. I already knew what sat on the shelves. Practical goods, packaged goods, some clothing and hardware. A little bit of everything. What I didn’t want was to take anything from a town that only sees shipments twice a year.

Walking back toward the Zodiac, we passed dead seals hauled up above the tide line.

Ittoqqortoormiit runs on a hodge-podge. One tour operator, a family-run business that invites visitors to stay in their home. One guesthouse, self-catering because there are no restaurants or cafés. One tourist office. One community art shop. One museum in the old Royal Greenlandic Trading store, built in 1930, though closed for renovation. That’s what the town has to offer a visitor.

Two supply ships a year. Royal Arctic Line, Greenland’s state-owned shipping company, runs the route from Denmark and West Greenland when the fjord opens in July and September. The state has been running supplies to this town since 1925, when Denmark founded it as an outpost. Food, fuel, building materials. Everything the town needs from outside arrives in those two windows. In winter, the ships stop coming altogether. In winter, the ships stop coming altogether. In between, hunters go out on the sea ice for food.

A helicopter runs twice a week from Nerlerit Inaat. The same helicopter carries residents, workers, tourists, fresh food, and mail. In winter, the helicopter doesn’t fly. Drifting snow, total darkness, weather.

Tourists come in the same weeks. Expedition ships when the ice retreats. Schooners like the Opal, small groups off the Iceland flight. A few independent travelers on the helicopter. Somewhere between five hundred and seven hundred a year, most of them arriving in the weeks the supply ships come in.

The population has been shrinking. Around 360 today, down from 539 twenty years ago and that’s counting the kids. Hunters need sea ice to hunt seals and other marine mammals. A shorter ice season means less hunting. The way this town has always fed itself is fading. Tourism is what comes next.

My pueblo in Mexico faced a similar question in 1992. The road got widened. The airport got expanded. The shipping came in through Progreso. Cancún grew from a fishing village to a city of a million. My pueblo has 2,000 people now, spread across both sides of the highway. A Pemex and a 7-Eleven. Thirty-four years.

Ittoqqortoormiit doesn’t have a road to widen. It has a helicopter that can’t fly when the weather turns, a runway thirty-seven kilometers away, and a fjord that opens for two months of the year. All three run on the same short season. Ice comes later than it used to, and the town gets a little more time. That’s the only way this town gets bigger.

When I was there in August 2023, the town’s tour operator was Nanu Travel. Two years later, Nanu Travel has gone quiet. A new family-run business, Tsigaar Naasor, has opened as the town’s only operator. Two years, one flip. That’s how thin things are here. The town is one decision away from having no tour operator.

The town’s answer is a homestay. Guests eat what the family eats, sleep where the family sleeps, live in the house. Guest and host, no middleman. Whether that works at 500 to 700 visitors a year, or whether it holds at all, is a different question.

Ittoqqortoormiit’s future isn’t decided yet. The ice keeps the town isolated. The ice keeps the hunters fed. When the ice thins, the town has to build another way to live. Tourism is what comes in when hunting falls off. It runs on a short season. That season is getting longer. Whether the summer brings more tourists or more trouble, no one knows. Not even the town.

I stayed in the road in Ittoqqortoormiit and didn’t go into the store. Twice-a-year deliveries meant the shelves were for the town, not for tourists to pick over. That I already knew from a small pueblo in Mexico thirty-four years ago, when the shelves ran near-empty from May to December and you learned not to buy what somebody else was going to need on Wednesday.

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Other pieces from the road.

When I first came to the Riviera Maya in 1992, and for many years after, the beach was pristine. Idyllic pinkish-white sand. The waves lap on the shore. A few people. You could swing in a hammock strung between Seagrape trees. Or stroll along the waterline and catch a glimpse of a sea turtle, or a school of cuddle fish. Pure fantasy. Right? That was the illusion people came back for, time and time again.

When someone booked with us, the money went to where they would stay. But what they were really paying for was that vision. A dream they wanted to live in for a week, pack-up and take home as a memory. Every property write-up and destination piece I wrote led with the beach. And what it stood for.

The first question, always, was what is the beach like. The region’s whole pitch was the beach itself.

The goose that laid the golden egg was the beach. We sold it. The business I ran was one of the first anywhere to put that coast online and take a booking from a stranger a continent away. A lot of those beach descriptions were mine to write. Some of that was the era. There weren’t jungle tours, adventure parks or much else built out. But we always knew the Riviera Maya was more than the beach. The cenotes. The Mayan culture. The places you could not find on your own. We knew drivers, restaurant operators, shopkeepers, the cenote owners, the people we trusted. Out of them, we could build a guest a day they'd never find alone.

Then, around 2011, the sargassum came. A little at first. It came and went. The guests took it as a temporary thing, and mostly it was easy to clean up. Over the years it became more substantial. It got its own season. You would arrive late in the afternoon, have a beer, look at a pristine beach, thrilled to be there. The next morning there would be six inches or more washed up on the beach and another three feet of it out in the water. Beige coming in, then brown, turning crusty and black as it dried, smelling like low tide, or rotten eggs. I never liked this sea tangle touching me. Gives me the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it. Now you had to wade out through it to reach clear water, the weed scratching at your legs. Paradise turned nasty overnight. Hardest on the families with little kids. It was not only the properties. My one weekend treat was lunch at an oceanfront restaurant. I would show up to find the shoreline stacked with weed, the smell riding the wind. That one was heartbreaking. And a bit nauseating.

For years the biggest complaint I ever got was about “turtle grass.” People wanted a “swimmable” beach. A perfect beach. Perfect meant just sand, no rocks, no corals, no turtle grass. Turtle grass is a good sea grass, the sea turtles eat it. People would want a path cleared through it so they didn’t have to walk across it. Now it was this.

One family reunion I will never forget. A big multi-generational trip in a rented home, and the owner would not pay to clear the seaweed, so it kept mounting up. They had a pool. They wanted the beach. They were furious. There really isn't anyone to blame, it is like the weather, beyond our control. But we were small and agile and we worked with a lot of independent owners, so we could call in favors. We called an owner with a much more expensive villa and said, here is the situation, the seaweed is terrible, would you take them, make an offer. At the same time we told the first owner something had to be done. In the end we moved the reunion into a bigger villa. Less beach, less seaweed a huge pool, a cook, and enough amenities inside to put the trip over the top. The seaweed became a non-issue.

That was the job. Not the beach. Knowing who to call.

It was not always that dramatic. With three or four hundred properties spread along a very long coast, we could not always know which beach was affected. Beaches change even without seaweed, normal erosion based on currents and weather. You cannot predict it. But we knew the nuances. Where there is a cut in the reef for the boats, that is often where the weed comes in, so we would steer a guest further up the sand. Now the forecasts do some of that for you. NOAA and the monitoring networks can tell you where it will be heavy before you ever get on the plane, so you can pick your spot, or pick another date.

I do not think leaning on the beach was the mistake. The beach was the biggest asset, of course you lead with it. The miss, for the ones who made it, was having nothing else ready, no cenote, no obscure ruin, no pueblo, no cooking class already familiar to a guest. When the beach failed, they scrambled. The ones who had all that in their back pocket, and we did, could save a vacation.

The places making it now are the ones that were never only a beach. The resorts and boutique hotels with an identity beyond the sand, the pool, the food, the design, where the beach is secondary. The operators who sell the cenote and the ruins and the day trip. The diehards who love the area move their dates and come anyway. The places struggling are the ones with nothing to offer but the sand. And that is before everything else people have gotten wary of, the bad press, the taxis, whether they got their money's worth.

People used to ask me if a vacation rental was a good investment. I always said:

If you have to mortgage your home to buy it, the answer is no. A vacation rental is like Vegas. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, and you do not want to lose the roof over your head because you borrowed against it.

Some of those owners are selling now.

The cleanup is not cheap, and somebody always pays for it. The head of the Riviera Maya Hotel Association puts the bill at around $150 million a year, just to keep the sand visible. That is in a state where almost everyone lives off tourism. It is a lot of money to spend defending a single commodity.

This is the worst season on record, worse than last year. The Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt keeps getting bigger, fed by warmer water, farm runoff, even dust off the Sahara. It lands everywhere now, from Key West to Barbados to Puerto Rico, which is taking the worst of it. And the same rule holds all the way across: the leeward coast stays clear, the Gulf side of Florida, the sheltered side of every island, because geography decides which beach you can use, not marketing. It came early this year, January and February.

Nobody can stop it. There is no association or agency in Mexico or the Caribbean you can hold responsible for an ocean. The man who runs Tulum’s beach crews, David Buchanan, has said it plainer than any brochure ever will: they see it every day, and they cannot hide it. A researcher there, Iván Penié, said this year is beyond what the Navy, the state, and every private crew combined can clear. Everything anyone is doing, moving a family to another villa, a town dropping a barrier in the water, is a short-term solution to a long-term problem. The sargassum decides how long the season is now, and how short, and what each day looks like. Like weather.

Still, some places are handling it better than others, and it is worth asking why. Puerto Morelos, just up the coast from where I was, has stayed swimmable through weeks when Playa del Carmen and Tulum were buried. Not because of anything in a brochure. It has a reef about five hundred meters offshore, a protected marine park, that breaks the open sea before it reaches the sand, and no other big beach town on that stretch has one that close in. They backed the reef up with a couple of kilometers of floating barrier and a Navy ship that sits offshore and pulls the weed before it lands. They stayed open. Their mayor calls the beaches sargassum free. That’s a stretch. They still get it in the summer peak. But Puerto Morelos fares better than its neighbors, and it fares better because it had more than one thing going for it.

They are doing the smart thing with what they haul off, too. The hotel and restaurant owners there started a program to turn the weed into something useful, plates and packaging, fertilizer, building block, fuel. Down in the Dominican Republic an engineer built an unmanned boat that skims it off the open water before it reaches shore. In Barbados they mix it with waste from the rum distilleries and run cars on the gas that comes off it. This summer nine islands sent people to Martinique and Guadeloupe to study how the French islands handle theirs.

None of it is a cure. What it is, is spreading the bet. The places doing better are the ones that never staked everything on a clean beach, the ones with a reef, a plan, a second product, a phone full of people to call. It is what I did moving one furious family to another villa, done at the scale of a whole coast.

And it is not only a beach. Everybody in tourism is selling something the weather can take back. Ski towns sell snow, and this past winter was the thinnest in over a decade, resorts closing weeks early and a few not opening at all.

Wine country sells the vineyard and the view, and Napa and Sonoma have burned in three of the last four autumns, so harvest season and fire season are now the same season. Canada’s forests, the whole reason someone books the lodge, are on fire as I write this, over 800 fires at once. Every one of those is a beach. So wherever you are in this business, the question is not whether your thing is beautiful. It is what you sell on the morning the beautiful thing is gone, and whether you already know the answer before you need it.

I left in 2019, after twenty-seven years. I watch it now from Maine and visit time to time. It is heartbreaking. Not the business of it, though that is real. It is sad because the place is one of the most beautiful on earth. The beach and the jungle and the cenotes, the ancient culture, the people born there raising their kids. None of that should ever go away.

Everybody is counting the economics, and you understand why. Nobody is counting the turtles. The weed piles up on the same sand they nest on, and the hatchlings cannot get through it to the water. That was the thing I used to send people down to the beach to see. A glimpse of a turtle.

Nobody is adding up what that one costs.

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A few honest questions

Where does the sargassum even come from?

It took off around 2011 and has come back every year since. There is a belt of it now that stretches across the Atlantic, and it keeps growing. Warmer water, nutrients from agricultural runoff feeding the blooms, and even dust off the Sahara. Trade winds and currents carry the floating mats to Mexico, Belize, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and parts of Florida.

When is the season, and which beaches stay clearest?

Roughly April to October, worst in summer, though 2026 came early. The clearest beaches face away from the open Atlantic.

I run a destination or a small tourism business. What do I actually do about this?

Look at your destination’s assets and resources. All of them, not just the beach. What else can a guest do in your area, nature, culture, people. Build real relationships with the people who own and run those things, so you have somewhere to send a guest when the beach fails. And plan for the bad season while you are still having good ones.

A ski town lives on snow and still asks what happens the year it does not snow. Business is not always sunny. The ones who make it already asked the what-ifs.

If you missed earlier parts of the journey…

The best place to sit is in the back of the church. Closest to the center aisle. Someone told me that before my first Luminiscence show at the Basilica de Notre-Dame in Nice, and they were right. From back there, when the lights drop, the color comes down the whole length of the nave toward you, the kaleidoscope spreading across the vaults. I’ve queued up early every time to get my seat.

I love churches wherever I go. I like the history, the architecture, the hush of them. So the last time I sat there, watching it come apart in color, I thought: a building that usually only draws a crowd on Sunday mornings, full on a Thursday night. I meant it as a good thing. I’m still not sure it only is.

The Basilica de Notre Dame is the setting for a light show that runs three nights a week. On Fridays, you can hear it with a live choir; on other nights, it plays with digital music. I always choose the choir. To me, the difference is hardly worth arguing over, but the basilica feels more alive that way. I’ve seen three shows there, and each time the building became a stage.

Old churches are mysterious places full of tradition and ritual. The gold leaf, the candles, the heavy silence. Some old reflex still wants me to genuflect. This was nothing like that.

Since 2023, it’s spread from cathedral to cathedral, Nice, Bordeaux, Paris, London, Philadelphia, São Paulo. Each show is made for that church. The narration, music, and projections fit its history and architecture. In Bordeaux, dozens of hidden projectors are calibrated to the stone itself. You can’t see the Nice show anywhere else; different building, different story. The old masons shaped these vaults over centuries. Now programmers are measuring them to the millimeter so the light can follow the same surfaces. Maybe that’s not desecration. Maybe it’s just a modern spin on ancient architecture.

The experience is more than the arches and saints. It’s the building’s history, the music, and the light across the ceiling. You see angels and clouds like the Sistine Chapel, then the Milky Way, then an arboretum where raindrops hit the glass.

Compare it to the Rembrandt and Van Gogh immersive shows. Warehouse or simple box style rooms. No soul to sell. Impressive in their own right, the experience is different. It is sight and sound but without the depth of marred history, mystery, architecture, and reverence. The space itself was not sacrificed for the show.

Hall des Lumières in Manhattan is more of a middle ground between warehouse immersive art and the cathedrals. A former Beaux-Arts bank (the old Emigrant Savings Bank) built around 1909 is a temple of money reborn as a temple of art. The light show is still impressive, and with the building’s unique H design allows you to move about the room, different vantage points, alcoves, and cavernous ceilings.

The place that is not only a projection screen but the subject is the Basilica de Notre Dame, and the other churches. Still consecrated, still holds Mass, and the show often tells the basilica’s own story across its own vaults. The building is a living shrine of sorts. Alive because of its parishioners. What’s left of them, anyway.

Empty pews, the cost of keeping these buildings standing, tourism is survival. Cologne Cathedral now charges admission, money earmarked for the roof. The light show isn’t sacrilege, so much as a lifeline. In France, only about 2% of Catholics attend Mass every Sunday, and just 7–8% practice regularly. Otherwise its crickets, with the occasional visitor lighting a candle, or kneeling in worship. The collection plate can only do so much.

Where Istanbul Draws the Line

I took off my shoes, the borrowed scarf slipping, and stood at the back of the Blue Mosque while prayer kept moving up front. You feel right away it is still a working mosque. People coming and going, a rhythm you don’t want to be the one to break. So the light show, when they run it, stays outside. They throw it on the walls after dark and everyone watches from the square.

Across the plaza, Hagia Sophia has been everything. Cathedral, mosque, museum, mosque again. The layers are all still in there. But it prays again now, and you don’t run a spectacle through a room full of people on their knees.

Here they keep the show on the outside walls. The buildings that let it inside are the ones where almost no one kneels anymore. Like Nice.

What the lightshow does not buy, and what the Church keeps hoping it will, is faith. The pitch, especially in the American cathedrals, is that the awe is a doorway, get them in for the spectacle and maybe some of them stay for the God. Come for the lights, stay for the rest. Maybe. I’ve never seen anyone count the person who bought a ticket and came back for Mass. I didn’t.

In Paris, people have been ready to call in an exorcist over contemporary art in churches. Repeated traditionalist protest. Most recently as this month at an art installation in a Paris church during the Nuit Blanche festival. Despite the pushback, the show still went on.

They’re protesting a silent disco with drinks, an Eminem playlist, a provocative art installation. None of it has anything to do with the church it’s playing in. That’s what brings the petitions out. The light show is a different animal. It’s pulled from the church’s own history, built for that one room and useless anywhere else, which is maybe why nobody was protesting outside in Nice, at least not on the nights I was there. A disco just wants the walls. Luminescence wants the building.

What does the light show actually buy? All of this.

The answer starts with money, which the diocese is not talking about. These buildings are money pits. The roof, the stone, the heating bill in a room the size of a soccer pitch. The collection plate stopped covering that a long time ago. A show that sells out three nights a week gets closer than Sunday’s offerings do anymore. Some of the ticket money goes to a production company. This is a business, not a charity. A portion goes to the building’s own repairs, and the bigger money lands in the town. The people who come for the show fill the hotels and the restaurants and the trains. Looking at the numbers, they are boring in an accountant sort of way and staggering. England’s cathedrals put a couple hundred million into local economies in a year. That is what tourism is supposed to do. Benefit the people who live there.

Luminiscence and other similar shows have sold over 4 million tickets. You can have whatever feelings you want about that. The feelings don’t fix the roof.

I’ve stepped into churches throughout my travels. None were lit like this. This time I was inside, in the dark, looking nowhere else. Not taking in the statues, the crucifixes, not stopping to light a candle. The narration was in French. I don’t speak French, but I followed the story anyway, through color, light and sound. I kept going back, and I brought someone new each time. There was always something I had missed before. The building felt larger the longer I sat there.

Which leaves me about where I started. Back of the church, on the inside aisle, on a stranger’s tip, waiting for it to go dark. A building that sat empty six days out of seven, now full and paying for its own roof. I know some people would call that a step too far. Me, I think it’s a blessing.

What are your thoughts as to churches becoming an attraction beyond religion?

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For saints, sinners, and the just plain curious.

Answered prayers, the logistical kind.

Q: What is Luminiscence?
A: An immersive light-and-sound show projected inside historic cathedrals. It combines 360-degree video mapping with music, sometimes a live choir, to tell the story of the building. It’s produced by the French company LOTCHI, now part of Banijay Live.

Q: Where can I see Luminiscence shows?
A: The show tours cathedrals across Europe and beyond. Past and current cities include Nice, Bordeaux, Paris, Strasbourg, Reims, London, Brussels, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and São Paulo. Locations rotate, so check the official site for what’s running now.

Q: Where can I buy tickets?
A: Through the official site, luminiscence.com, and ticketing platforms like Fever, Tiqets, and GetYourGuide.

Q: How much do tickets cost?
A: In Nice, prices start around 12 euros. Pricing varies by city and seating.

Q: How long is the show?
A: About 45 to 50 minutes.

Q: When does it run?
A: In Nice, three nights a week, typically Thursday through Saturday, with two showings a night. Schedules differ by city.

Q: Is it suitable for children?
A: Yes. In Nice there’s no minimum age, and small children are welcome on a lap.

Q: What’s the best seat?
A: Toward the back, on the center aisle. That’s where the projections converge and the color runs the full length of the nave toward you.

Q: Are there other cathedral light shows besides Luminiscence?
A: Yes, and it’s spreading fast. AURA runs in Montréal and at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Luxmuralis tours cathedrals across the UK. Hall des Lumières in New York does the same idea inside a former bank. Luminiscence is the biggest name, not the only one.

Q: What is AURA?
A: An immersive light-and-sound experience created by Montréal studio Moment Factory. The original runs inside Notre-Dame Basilica in Montréal, and a version plays at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. It turns the architecture itself into the canvas, with orchestral music and projection mapping.

Q: What is Luxmuralis?
A: A British art collective, the artist Peter Walker and composer David Harper, that stages immersive light-and-sound shows inside cathedrals. It tours UK cathedrals and has appeared at Washington National Cathedral in the US, with themed installations like Space, Life, and Time.

Q: Is it disrespectful to hold a light show in a church?
A: Depends who you ask. The shows run outside of Mass, tell the building’s own story, and rarely draw protest. The objections tend to land on silent discos and Eminem playlists, not on a show pulled from the church’s own history. After three visits, my take: a full church beats an empty one. Yours may differ.

And if light and sound shows at a cathedral have you grabbing your rosary tighter, here is a video of a now famous Catholic priest DJ’s techno music. If you watch this, you may want to go to confession.

On the second floor of the Tourismuseum in Unterseen there is a display tracking the six-day hiking route Johann Wolfgang von Goethe took through the Bernese Oberland in 1779. They had his dates, his route, and even journal entries. I stood there a while, reading it all.

Switzerland was not on my list. My sister wanted to go. Once there, I was fascinated to learn about how long Interlaken has hosted guests and tourism. I have lived in or near tourism towns most of my life, and some in the mountain regions, but it never occurred to me that Interlaken was one of the first destinations to embrace Alpine tourism. Alpine tourism didn’t start with ski lifts or snowboards. For a long time, people saw the Alps as something to cross, not somewhere to vacation.

Places like Interlaken, Grindelwald, and Lauterbrunnen were attracting Romantic-era travelers and artists. They came for the scenery. Really, it’s the cliffs, the waterfalls, and that almost unreal feeling you only get in the Alps.

Interlaken quickly became a place for wealthy visitors. People who’d come to “take the cure.” They’d stay for weeks, breathing the mountain air. Doctors back then prescribed goat’s whey for nerves, digestion, lung trouble, and just about every complaint blamed on city life. I learned that every morning before sunrise, local goat herders would hike down from the high pastures with wooden tubs of fresh, warm whey on their backs, so guests could have it at breakfast.

Local aristocrats staged the first festival at castle ruins outside town. Farmers performed stone-tossing, wrestling, and yodeling for European tourists. The start of Swiss cultural tourism. Traditions like yodeling are still part of the region’s folklore today.

Interlaken kept noticing what wealthy travelers would pay for, then shaping the next version of the experience to sell them.

The Tourismuseum is the only museum in Switzerland dedicated to the history of tourism. It’s in a clergy house built in 1640. Four floors full of history on the souvenir trade, transport, mountaineering, and hospitality. The displays go back to the 1770s. They show how locals decided what to protect (the landscape, the view, traditional practices) and what to sell to tourists (experiences, transport, hospitality, souvenirs).

The Höhematte Meadow is the best example. In the 1860s the Belle Époque, a period of prosperity and cultural growth was hitting Interlaken. Grand hotels going up.

The Grand Beau-Rivage opened in 1874. Steamships across Lake Thun and Lake Brienz. Speculators eyeing the unobstructed view of the Jungfrau, the most valuable open ground in the valley, for a hotel and casino zone.

Thirty-seven local landowners, farmers and local hoteliers watched developers circling the meadow. As a co-op they purchased the land. Nothing shall ever be built on the Höhematte, and the view of the mountains shall be preserved forever.

They understood the view was worth more empty than full of buildings.

The view is what people come for.

You can stand on the Höhematte now and look at the same mountain the British aristocrats saw in 1850. The view is not luck. It is a 160-year-old civic agreement. The farmers then could not have pictured what the meadow gets used for now. Paragliders. Lots of them. They launch off the cliffs above town in colored canopies and float down to the same field the speculators wanted to pave. The pact stands. The view stays. The field still belongs to everyone.

It’s deliberate.

Even the cows in the valleys are intentional. The country pays the farmers to keep them there. You hear the bells from across a field, ringing as the cows shift their feet. The bells are how the farmer knows where the cows are. The country decided a long time ago that what tourists were paying to see had to be real.

Protecting the view was one decision. Made it once, and it's held for 160 years. Keeping a town livable is the opposite kind of problem. There is no pact you sign and walk away from. It is a fight that resets every year, up against the same money that never really goes away.

I am not going to pretend Interlaken has solved the problems of tourism. It hasn’t. In the Lauterbrunnen valley buses run between the villages all day, every day, full of visitors on their way somewhere. The village priest, Markus Tschanz, told Swiss public broadcaster SRF that the people of Lauterbrunnen feel like employees in an amusement park. Even the carpenter, he said, has become a tourist employee. They cannot escape it, because they live there. I worked in an amusement park for years. He’s right.

I walked along the Lauterbrunnen valley trail JRR Tolkien walked at 19 years old. The trails in the valley felt close to sacred, mystical. Or maybe that was just me. Every so often a small sign asked visitors to keep their voices low, mind their dog, and to tread carefully. People did. I also found the modern day farm stands along the path.

Self-service cabinets sit at the end of farmer’s driveways in the Lauterbrunnen valley. Wooden, on legs, with glass-front refrigerators inside. Inside the fridge are wedges of cheese with handwritten paper labels, fresh veg, dried meats and jars of pickled things. A small painted cow on the side as the only signage.

There is a coin slot, and I actually saw one with a credit card swipe. No farmer in sight.

You open the door. You take what you want. You pay. You keep walking.

I bought cheese and meat sticks from no one, twice that week.

My friend Kashi lives in Interlaken. We worked together in Mexico thirty years ago. She runs vacation rentals here. We talked about the challenges of rentals and Airbnb, plus the community and similar stories I’ve heard from owners and managers wherever I’ve gone.

We talked about the town. Kashi told me that even kindergarteners are taught to walk to school on their own. The kids take the train alone. Her two boys have been riding up to the ski mountains by themselves since they were eight, putting their gear on at the platform, spending the day skiing, then coming home.

In a place that has been hosting strangers for 250 years, they have still built for their own kids, not just for the people with cameras. You see it in small things. An unwatched cheese fridge. The fact that Kashi didn’t even know there were Interlaken police.

This isn’t tourism done well. It’s what’s at stake.

During the years Kashi has been building her rental business, Interlaken has seen second homes rise by nearly 30%. The town also enacted a two-year building freeze while a group figures out how to slow the conversion of homes into rentals. The Lauterbrunnen council has proposed a 5 to 10 franc entry fee on day-trippers, exempting anyone who books local lodging or arrives by train. April is one of the months the tourism boards have been steering visitors toward, to take some of the July-August pressure off.

We came at the right time by accident.

Interlaken has had 250 years to figure this out. It still hasn't. Most places don't get that long.

“I prefer to go in at the seaside road,” Stefanos said, “to see the place where I give the ring.”

It was a small chapel above the sea in the settlement of Aeolos. “Panagia Katafygiotissa” on Katafygi Bay. The walls were painted by a man named Dimitris Mytaras, whose name I had not heard. But then again why would I. I knew nothing about Greece. Stefanos asked what we cared about and then he built our day together from that.

The only place my sister and I wanted to see, the must see, was the Temple of Poseidon. That was the whole list.

The white-washed chapel was not on any list. It was his. It was the place he proposed to his wife. He could only get in because friends lived in the village.

Mexico’s Riviera Maya, from 1992, with a boyfriend and two trucks of dive gear and $7000 USD. I know what it costs to give a stranger your day, your knowledge, your country. I know what gets traded when the price is money. And I know what the years do to the people who keep giving it away honestly.

A friend gave me his name before I flew over. She is American and Greek, and she hires Stefanos every time she lands in Athens.

He kept talking.

He had been talking all morning. The way someone talks who has things he wants you to know about the place he lives in, and about himself, because he can’t separate the two.

His daughter was nine. His wife was from Crete and owned a beauty salon in the neighborhood we drove through. He worked from before sunrise to past midnight, some days to two in the morning when the overnight flights came in.

Those are long-ass days.

But that’s high season anywhere. You work when there’s work.

He was not from Athens. Paros was home, his parents still there. He flies back often. The car comes by ferry. The long boat ride he can’t stand. One small island is his favorite though, and not a famous one. Schinoussa. Down past Naxos. Tiny, 229 people. The water he could not describe was that beautiful.

Taste tsipouro, not ouzo, he said. Ouzo gives you nothing but a headache. (Yes, I knew that from personal experience.) The best wine in Greece was Malagouzia. Then he spoke of a motorbike accident in 2010, the one that made him pray and keep praying. He went to church every Sunday now.

All day he showed us places and how to see them without the admission price or the queue. The back way to ruins and the photograph no one else had found.

Then he pulled the car over. “Get out,” he said, “I will stay with the car. Go watch, it’s very traditional.” It was a changing of the guard at the president's residence, on a side street, no crowd, just a handful of people.

We stood a few feet from the ceremony. A tour bus would never travel this side street. A regular taxi would have driven straight past, but not him.

At the Temple of Poseidon he told how the sea got its name. Aegeus's son Theseus went to Crete to kill the monster Minotaur. He promised his father he would come back under white sails if he lived. Theseus killed Minotaur, got drunk on the way home and forgot to change the sails. Aegeus saw black sails. He threw himself off the cliffs. That is the Aegean Sea.

Then, without changing tone, he said the average salary in Greece was 880 euros ($1020 USD) a month. Before the crisis, in 2004, 2005, if you didn't have coffee in your house you went next door and the neighbor gave you coffee. Now if you knock, the neighbor won’t open the door. He said it the same way he said his daughter was nine. The same way he said Malagouzia.

I knew this. I had told a version of it myself, in Mexico, by the end. The pressure of tourism shows up first in the smallest gestures, the ones that used to be free. But it shows up second in something harder to put your finger on: the willingness to give a stranger the inside of your life. He was still handing it over. He was driving us along the seaside instead of the highway so he could show us where he gave his wife the ring. He was nine years into the job and he had not yet learned to stop.

I can say this because I did the same thing. I whored out my whole life for the business, for the customers. It helped. The business worked. Was the price worth it, I still wonder. So I knew what I was watching when I watched him. I had been him.

But then he gave me what I used to give my guests. The day. The stories. The thing you cannot buy because it was never for sale. I had spent a career handing it to strangers. Now a stranger handed it back to me. The friends I made were never an accident. They were the selfish reason I kept going.

I should be honest. I am glad I went to Athens. I do not need to go back. Maybe I am too much of an outdoors or small town girl. It was congested and the noise did not stop.

The graffiti was everywhere. He drove through all of it. He still handed us his story. His daughter, his island, his wife’s ring, his Sunday church, his favorite wine. The city was wearing him down. He had not let it take the work.

He told me about the cruise ships. Three, four a day into Piraeus now. Two thousand people at a time. They walk off the boat for a few hours and walk back on. They do not sleep on the island. They do not eat a meal there. “They buy only one salad, and one ice cream, and one souvenir,” he said. “Only that.”

You cannot see a place that way, he said. You want minimum two days. One island, one place, something. I had one day. He told me you need two. The next morning I flew to Santorini like everyone else. He gave me a full day. I was already leaving.

But that was Santorini, the next day. Back in Athens, the driver still had hours to go.

His daughter was sick. The nine-year-old. She was home waiting for him to take her to the doctor while he drove us through Athens. He mentioned it once and kept driving. My sister and I both insisted he drop us off early and go take care of her.

He bought us souvenirs. He paid for them out of his own pocket, small things, before he left us at the Acropolis. A sick child waiting at home, the 880-euro month most Greeks live on, and he bought us souvenirs.

Then he came back. After we had walked the hill and seen the marble, he came back for us at the end of the day. The last thing he did was make us promise. “Do not take a taxi off the street, they cannot be trusted”.

This is how Stefanos lives. One person trusts him and hands him the next. My friend, then me, then whoever I tell. The cruise ship needs none of it. It does not need his name, it does not need to trust him, and it never comes back. Two thousand people, a salad, an ice cream, gone by dark.

I spent 27 years building the same thing he has, one guest at a time. Trust you cannot put on a brochure. It does not scale. It was never meant to.

That is what is worth flying for. Not the view. The man who takes the long way to show you where he gave his wife the ring.

If something I wrote made you think, laugh, or feel like someone finally said the thing — buy me a glass of Malagouzia wine. It keeps me something to sip after a long day of writing.

Buy Me A Glass of Wine

The promoted version is the coastline, the festival, the Michelin chef, the views. It’s the two sentences in the tourism brochure, the photo taken in October that brings visitors in March, the “emerging food scene” with three restaurants and two of them seasonal.

The other version is the woman who tells you to ignore the menu. The family that’s fed people at that crossroads for three centuries while the military took two-thirds of their village. The son who chose to come back. The lemon orchard that almost disappeared and came back because two people decided it was worth planting. The bakery that closed not because of too many tourists, but because not enough people live there anymore.

I’ve spent 35 years inside this industry. Business owner first, in Mexico’s Riviera Maya when there was one gas station in Playa. Then internet entrepreneur, professor, consultant. I’ve watched the official version get made. I know why it ends up as two sentences about Templar chapels and the rhythm of the seasons.

Destination Sunday is where I write about what gets left out. Some weeks it’s a field piece, a place I went, something I found, what it reveals about how destinations survive or don’t. Some weeks it’s a closer look at how the industry works: why landing on a travel list can break a small town before it helps it, why the repeat guest is invisible in most destination reports, why more marketing rarely fixes what’s broken.

You don’t need to work in hospitality or tourism to follow this.

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Most of the time the gap has a person standing in it.

The woman at the hotel in Comps-sur-Artuby told me to ignore the menu and look in the case instead. She waved off my spilled drink. She brought lavender ice cream I hadn’t ordered and didn’t charge me for the drink I’d knocked over.

The family has been doing that since 1737.

The tourism association gave the village two sentences.

If something I wrote made you think, laugh, or feel like someone finally said the thing — buy me a margarita. It keeps me on the road, at the bar, and writing.

Buy Me A Margarita

This week the patriarch of the hotel, Arnaud Bain, sent me an email. Three paragraphs of thanks. A paragraph about his son, who he is proud of, and an invitation to come back.

That folks, is hospitality.

It’s the same gesture of kindness and care. Once at the table, once at the keyboard.

The Bain family has been doing it that way for 297 years.

His son’s name is Clément.

He’s 24. He has worked in kitchens since hotel school.

I am not talking flipping burgers!

Clément has worked at the Provençal truffle institution, Chez Bruno in Lorgues. The Hostellerie des Gorges de Pennafort in Callas, a country hotel-restaurant with a Michelin star. And a medieval castle turned hotel, The Château de Trigance, twenty minutes from his home.

For those of you not fluent in Michelin stars, this is not a minor league resume.

Then Paris.

Le 114 Faubourg at Le Bristol, one of the city’s palace hotels. The kind of place chefs spend careers trying to reach!

This year, Nice. At Les Agitateurs, a Michelin-starred restaurant by the port.

And next, home.

Back to Comps-sur-Artuby population 346.

In Arnaud’s words:

Mon fils sera également très content de vous lire et est également très motivé pour reprendre la suite de notre maison familiale. Il sera la dixième génération !

Roughly translated: my son will be glad to read this, and is motivated to carry on our family house. He’ll be the tenth generation.

A 24-year-old with that resume could go anywhere!

He’s choosing a village of 346 people, a hotel his family has run since 1727, a kitchen that suggests lavender ice cream to people who spill their drinks, and the tenth generation of a story that has outlasted Louis XV, the French Revolution, two world wars, and an artillery camp.

The regional tourism page still mentions chapels and seasons. It still doesn’t mention him.

If you missed the original article…

Menton, France is known for lemons. Lemon soap, lemon tea towels, lemon-print dresses, lemon sorbet, limoncello, and lemon tarts in every café window.

A few weeks ago, I was wandering le vieux (old) village and popped into a boutique on Rue Saint-Michel. The shopkeeper handed me a slice of Menton lemon. Rind, pith, pulp. Eat the whole thing, she said. So I did. No bitterness. The peel and pith were almost sweet.

That’s the part most people throw away.

Most visitors to Menton never taste it.

I wanted to know how a lemon could taste like that. So I went looking for the origins of the Menton lemon and contacted Maison Gannac to make a reservation to visit their mountainside orchard.

The lemons at Maison Gannac are the size of grapefruits. A few are even bigger.

I walked steep dirt paths above Menton. The path was loose under my feet. I kept stopping, stunned that branches could hold fruit that big. Huge lemons with thick peel, slightly knobbed, a deep saturated yellow that made the Meyer lemons we get in the United States look small and inadequate. On the ground was a box of freshly hand-picked Menton lemons. The leaf and a bit of branch were still attached, by law. I folded a leaf between my fingers and smelled it. It smelled like the fruit.

The peel is where the flavor lives, Laurent Gannac will tell you. Having a peel you can eat is the entire reason this lemon exists.

Every February, Menton holds a festival celebrating the lemon. A quarter of a million people come from all over. The parade floats are made of real citrus — 140 tons of it. Most of those lemons are imported from Spain. Menton lemons are too rare and too expensive to build sculptures out of.

The fruit that comes off the floats afterward gets sorted and sold. Nothing wasted. The festival, the tourism office, and the farmers all work together.

Most of the festival goers never see a working orchard.

If you do, here’s what you find.

A working farm. Not a manicured tourist attraction. The paths along the restanques, or terraces. The dry stone retaining walls that turn a cliff into farmable terraces are steep and slick with loose dirt and stones. The men who pick the fruit carry 15-kilo boxes up the slope on their shoulders. The orchard sells trees to people who want to plant their own. There are bananas growing in a small grove. The micro subtropical climate exists because of the surrounding mountains, the winds come in from the sea, and sunshine.

The view is the Mediterranean to the south and Italy to the east.

A kilo of these lemons sells for €10.9, approximately $13 USD.

There are 56 producers left in Menton.

Trained in horticulture and landscape design, Laurent Gannac chose Menton for the subtropical climate. Citrus was at the center.

He had no idea what a Menton lemon was. He had never heard of it. He was building gardens for clients, and every time he brought a lemon tree to a property, the customer would ask the same question. Is that a Menton lemon?

The repeated question forced him to find out. That is how he discovered five hundred years of history.

Around that time, he met Vanessa Zeenni. In 1991, their son Adrien was born. Laurent planted his first lemon tree the same year. Laurent bought the hillside knowing he might lose every franc. Then more parcels. He laid them out as restanques. Every retaining wall on the property is one the family built.

There were no inherited terraces. There was no inherited orchard. Just a fallow hillside and two people who decided it was worth turning back into a farm.

A lemon tree takes three to four years to bear fruit. Vanessa watered trees six hours a day. To carry the family through the wait, she trained as a hotelier and worked as a concierge in Monaco.

Adrien grew up among the trees. He says it himself in a video from a few years back.

Other people are born in cabbages. I was born among the citronniers.

He went to business school in Nice, then got an agricultural diploma at the horticulture school in Antibes. Joining his father in 2015, he brought what his father didn’t have… The idea of building a brand that ran from the tree to the shelf.

The team grew from two has grown to 30. They make almost a hundred products now. Limoncello, jams, candied lemon in salt, lemon powder, a creamy spread called L’Onctueux that he developed with the chef Philippe Colinet. They work with brewers on citrus beers. With an olive oil couple, Anne and Erwan, who make a Nice olive paste they pair with Menton lemon. Mauro Colagreco at Mirazur, the three-Michelin-star restaurant on the Italian border, cooks with Gannac lemons.

So does ChefAlain Ducasse.

The orchard visits, the boutique, all of it is farm tourism. The visit isn’t an amenity. It’s part of how the farm survives.

When Adrien needed to plant 200 more trees and convert a building into a workshop, he raised €130,000 from people who wanted to support him. A regional youth-entrepreneur program, Initiative Menton, backed him on top of that. They said it themselves in their video:

We are aware of the difficulty of starting a business in agriculture.

On my visit, Céline was the guide.

A worker walked past us with a 15-kilo box of just-picked fruit balanced on his shoulder, headed up a path. A lemon Adrien grew last year took nine months to ripen and weighed over a kilo. It’s family lore now. I also saw a tree that produces lemons and oranges from the same trunk, grafted together. Two fruits, one root. After touring the orchard, I was treated to a tasting session. Jams, preserves, and liquors, from sweet to tart.

Menton is a town built by people from all over. The Grimaldis from Monaco. The Sardinians. The English in their winter villas. The Italians whose street names still run through the old town. Laurent from Occitanie. Vanessa from Beirut. Almost nothing in Menton was originally Menton.

Nothing continues by accident. Adrien chose to come back. His cousin works in the family’s logistics now too. Younger people are coming into horticulture and want to start their own orchards, Céline told me. The interest is there.

The land prices are the problem.

Menton got very good at turning the lemon into a destination. The festival, the producer network, the chefs, the guided tours. All of it works.

The same tourism economy that gave the Menton lemon an audience has driven the price of farmable terraces high enough that a young person without family money cannot start what Laurent started. The hillside he bought in 1988, with the risk of not getting it back, cannot be bought that way today.

The lemon survives. The next Laurent might not.

Menton hasn’t solved how to make room for the next one. Most destinations haven't started asking who gets to come next, or whether they can afford to stay.

The Menton lemon almost disappeared once. It came back because two people arrived in 1988 and decided to plant it. If they were 25 today and walked into the same town with the same idea, they could not afford the hillside.

Walking down from the orchard, I kept thinking about the kilo lemon. Nine months on a branch above the sea. Cut by hand. The whole thing held together by people who decided it was worth doing.

Menton built a brand around a lemon that almost disappeared. The lemon came back because two people arrived in 1988 and planted it. If they were 25 today and walked into the same town with the same idea, they could not afford the hillside.

Most destinations don’t get a second comeback.

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Most people do.

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