Dismissing Europe as a museum is glib. Think of it as a theme park

How better to come under the spell of Mitteleuropa than to stroll across the Charles Bridge, admiring Prague’s baroque skyline before reaching the glistening cobblestones of its old town? If Gallic charm is your thing, surely nothing can be so Parisian as whiling away an afternoon at the Café de Flore in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where Jean-Paul Sartre once puffed on Gitanes as he pondered being and nothingness. Or one might seek to discover the ancestral essence of Europe by basking in the old-money haunt of Capri, the whitewashed Aegean island of Santorini, or the honey-coloured streets of Dubrovnik. Pick among these destinations wisely and Europe offers the discerning traveller an unrivalled chance to commune with the continent’s timeless soul.

Kidding! It has been decades since any local has even given thought to lingering in what were once the most charming parts of the continent. The Charles Bridge is merely a thoroughfare between tourist traps, the Flore is a relic best left to Instagrammers these days, Dubrovnik merely an entry on a visiting American’s bucket list. From Barcelona to Bruges by way of Florence, vast swathes of Europe’s once-idyllic cities are a procession of foreigners shopping for souvenirs. Some hilltop villages in Provence or Tuscany now seem to exist chiefly as backdrops for linen-clad types sipping spritzes. This counts as an economic success of sorts: a continent that struggles to export cars or chemicals now gets its dollars and yuan by enticing foreigners to come over and spend on its shores instead. Alas, that comes at a steep price. In summer Europeans are not so much residents of their home cities as extras in someone else’s social-media feed.

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Forget the gibes about the old continent being a museum in which Europeans can live out their unambitious dolce vita. These days it is better to think of it as a theme park where locals can be gawped at by holidaying voyeurs. Museums preserve history; theme parks offer any visiting punter willing to suspend disbelief that feeling of being part of it. This is closer to the European tourist experience. For the point of a family holiday to France or Spain is not just to admire the scenery. It is also to imagine oneself a true European, a temporary denizen of the world’s lifestyle superpower. Indulging in long lunches, strolling through cities and dealing with surly waiters are just as much part of the travel experience as visiting the Uffizi. The continent’s greatest attraction is the suspicion that its inhabitants have somehow arranged life better.

Any European tempted to be flattered should remember that being a lifestyle superpower is not nearly the same as being the real thing. But hold that thought for after summer. Until then, selling authenticity by the night is a tidy earner. While America flogs artificial-intelligence models and China monopolises critical materials, only Charlemagne’s cramped peninsula seems to be able to satisfy the global middle class’s wanderlust. Of the roughly 1.5bn tourist journeys each year that involve crossing borders, over half are in European countries—a staggering success for a place with but a tenth of the world’s population. Six of the world’s ten most-visited countries are in Europe (including trips taken by fellow Europeans). The hotels, campsites and Airbnbs in the European Union can put up 32m people, enough to host the entire population of a dozen countries in the bloc. The nearly $900bn in revenues from international tourism make up around 7% of Europe’s exports, says the UN’s tourism arm. Who needs big tech when you have the Eiffel Tower and the Parthenon? Europe cannot create its own Google, but it excels at tempting Silicon Valley engineers into spending $1,500 a night to sleep in a converted convent. Would you like to see the gluten-free menu, madame?

Not every part of Europe partakes in the bonanza: the crowds remain unsurprisingly concentrated in a handful of photogenic bottlenecks. At the bustling end of the spectrum, even those who once welcomed well-heeled foreigners now realise they may have been too much of a good thing. Tourism hotspots in Spain and Croatia have been rebelling for a while, griping that short-term accommodation has turned homes into hotel rooms and residents into commuters. (Visiting Americans cosplaying at being European are often imitating locals who cannot themselves afford a break: for all their paid holiday, half of all Europeans lack the money for an annual trip of more than four days away from home.) Hoteliers and exchequers hooked on foreign income think the situation can be managed by shuffling visitors to more out-of-the-way places, or into quieter parts of the year. But imposing a tourism tax on hotels or trying to nudge tourists into the off-season won’t reclaim the Café de Flore for Parisians. Those days are gone.

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Wary of anything that smells like economic success, Europe is currently busy undermining itself as a destination. One issue is bureaucracy, a recurring continental passion. The ham-fisted introduction of a new procedure to check passports for visitors to the EU has left many tourists this summer in airport queues lasting up to five hours. A more enduring problem is heatwaves. A little sweating was once part of the charm of visiting the continent’s southern shores, a nudge towards taking up local siesta habits. Now it feels stifling. Italy risks turning its peak summer season into an endurance test with gelato in lieu of air-conditioning.

Yet even that won’t deter the hordes. And so the great European summer shuffle will continue, as this former Parisian can attest. Those who can afford to leave the tourism-worthy bits of the city decamp to the beach. The resulting void is filled by foreigners who soon grumble about how many other foreigners are in this place. And thus, paradoxically, visitors get what is the authentic Parisian experience: sitting beside other tourists, and doing their utmost to pretend they are not there.

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