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While many of us head abroad to catch some long-overdue sunshine or indulge in some lip-smacking cuisine, there are lots of people (perhaps many more than you’d expect) who could be categorised as ‘dark tourists’.
Dark tourism – which is generally defined by darktourism.com as travel to places that are associated with death, tragedy or suffering – has actually been around for a very long time. It sounds like a morbid concept, but plenty of major cities are home to enormously popular attractions that can be classified with this grim label.
The latest example is the controversial plan to transform Jamestown in Guyana into a tourist attraction, where cult leader and founder of the Peoples Temple Jim Jones and his 900 followers died in 1978 after consuming a poisoned grape-flavoured drink. If a tour operator is approved, the site could be opened to the public.
Jordan Vilchez, who moved into the commune when she was 14 years old but survived the mass suicide-murder, told the Independent that Guyana was entitled to profit from the events, but that ‘people who were manipulated into their deaths should be treated with respect’. And that’s the controversy with dark tourism – the balance between acknowledging, remembering, respecting and profiting from traumatic events. Here is everything you need to know about this eerie trend.
What are some examples of dark tourism?
The umbrella of examples of dark tourism is broad: it can encapsulate pretty much anything to do with atrocities, accidents, natural disasters or infamous deaths. More specifically, the Washington Post lists sites of genocide, assassination, incarceration, ethnic cleansing, war or disaster — either natural or accidental – as ‘dark tourism’.
When you really think about it, there are examples everywhere. In the USA, Gettysburg is the site of the largest, bloodiest battle in the American Civil War. Ground Zero in New York City commemorates all those who died in the 9/11 attacks. You can visit serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s house in Bath, Ohio, or the spot in Dallas, Texas where JFK was fatally shot.
There are endless remnants of the World Wars all over the world: think of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, former concentration camps, Anne Frank’s House in Amsterdam, or the Atomic Bomb Dome and Peace Park in Hiroshima, Japan.
Genocides such as those which took place in Rwanda, Cambodia and Bosia & Herzegovina are big draws for visitors, as are sites of other disasters – Chernobyl became an official tourist attraction in Ukraine in 2019, and you can also book a tour of Fukushima. And then there’s Pompeii, the site of the eruption which wiped out the ancient city way back in 79 AD.
What countries are famous for dark tourism?
Website darktourism.com has created a list of the top 20 countries for dark tourism, based on which are ‘most rewarding’ for those craving some macabre sites. You can read about them in more detail here, but this is the full list:
- Germany
- Poland
- USA
- Japan
- Rwanda
- Cambodia
- Ukraine
- Austria
- Kazakhstan
- North Korea
- Russia
- Vietnam
- Bosnia & Herzegovina
- Chile
- Indonesia
- Turkmenistan
- Thailand
- France
- UK
- Nagorno Karabakh, Azerbaijan
Who invented dark tourism?
The term dark tourism was coined back in 1996 by two faculty members at Glasgow Caledonian University – J. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley. But from people travelling to watch public hangings in London in the 1500s to fights-to-the-death that took place at the Colosseum in Rome, people have been journeying to spectate human misery for millennia.
Is dark tourism good or bad?
Dark tourism is – unsurprisingly – quite controversial, but an argument in favour of dark tourism is the education it can offer, enlightening visitors on the scale or extent of events of the past.
There’s also the economic contributions it can generate. Research published in Digital Journal shows the global value of the dark tourism market is set to reach $43.5bn by 2031. But while the economic benefits are evident, not everyone views this as a positive.
Professor Heather Lewis, who spoke to Discover Magazine, said: ‘The overall concern that we should have with dark tourism is making sure that we are being ethically and morally upright in the marketing and use of these locations as dark tourism destinations. We should never seek economic gain by exploiting others’ suffering and loss.’
It’s not hard to see why some people find the concept insensitive or offensive, and it poses a lot of dilemmas on how best to manage sites. What’s more, the era of smartphones and social media has led to more criticism. It’s been reported over the last few years that tourists at sites such as the Berlin Holocaust Memorial or at Auschwitz are often seen taking selfies in front of the sites. In response to that, an artist took to photoshopping the selfies and posting them on a website, to emphasise the insensitivity.
Why do people enjoy dark tourism?
The most obvious answer might be so that people can pay their respects to those who’ve suffered historically, and to gain a better understanding of our social responsibility.
However, humans do have a tendency to seek out the macabre. Philip Stone, executive director of the Institute for Dark Tourism Research at the University of Central Lancashire, said to the Washington Post: ‘I think, for political reasons or cultural reasons, we are turning to the visitor economy to remember aspects of death and dying, disaster.
‘We’ve just got this cultural fascination with the darker side of history; most history is dark,’ Stone says. ‘I think when we go to these places, we see not strangers, but often we see ourselves and perhaps what we might do in those circumstances.’
Why is dark tourism so popular today?
According to Verdict, Gen Z’s interest in dark tourism is a sizable contributing factor to its popularity: 91 percent of Gen Z surveyed in 2022 had engaged in dark tourism of some kind.
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