Special Interest Tourism - Activity

The Dark Tourism Spectrum

Alcatraz - once a feared prison, now the most popular tourist attraction in San Francisco! Image copyright: Sheena Westwood, from IELIT.

For those students of travel and tourism interested in these locations and the motives of visitors travelling to them, it can be helpful to analyse the dark tourism product. The following Dark Tourism Spectrum illustrates such an analysis:

1. Dark Fun Factories: These are commercially oriented, entertainment centres offering attractions and tours based on actual or fictional death and macabre incidents. Examples of dark fun factories include such family-friendly tourist attractions as the London Dungeon, Tower of London and Jack the Ripper tours. (http://www.jack-the-ripper-tour.com/)
2. Dark Exhibitions: Tourism products that encourage educational reflection on death, suffering or the macabre. They also tend still to have a commercial focus, but are more aimed at commemorating the dark events on exhibition, than entertaining customers. Examples include the Smithsonian Museum of American History exhibit 'September 11: Bearing Witness to History', which contains very few artefacts (only 45 in total). The exhibit doesn't even show images of the airliners approaching and crashing into the Twin Towers. The museum prefers to use photographs of eyewitnesses to tell the story. (http://americanhistory.si.edu/september11/)
3. Dark Dungeons: These are sites that mix entertainment with education ('edu-tainment') as they reveal sites of crime and punishment systems from history. The Galleries of Justice in Nottingham is an example of this type of tourism product, which has been promoted as 'the only site where you could be arrested, sentenced and executed'. Here the emphasis is more on entertainment, which contrasts with Robben Island, South Africa, where Nelson Mandela, among many other freedom fighters criminalised by the 'apartheid' system, were incarcerated. On Robben Island, where there has only been a short gap between the events that occurred there and the present day, visitors are encouraged to learn about the dangers of a philosophy which was based on the oppression of one group by another. (http://www.robben-island.org.za/))
4. Dark Resting Places: Where a cemetery is seen as a potential tourism product. Tours, special interest groups and the spread of the Internet have led to growth in interest in these sites, where the living can feel literally 'close to the dead'. Seen as occupying the 'middle ground' of dark tourism, cemeteries such as Père-Lachaise in Paris (http://www.pere-lachaise.com/perelachaise.php?lang=en ) are used to commemorate the (often very famous) dead, such as Jim Morrison and Isadora Duncan. Other cemeteries also offer open space for recreational activities, exercise and relaxation. Dark resting places can also become the subject of battles between land owners and local people over the right to access the site, such as in the case of Arnos Vale in Bristol (http://www.bafhs.org.uk/arnos/arnomain1.htm). An almost exquisite irony can be seen in the way the living use places meant to bury the dead as centres to improve the life of communities. Opportunities exist for tourism planners to introduce more entertainment and commerciality into some of these sites, such as the American idea of 'dearly departed tours'.
5. Dark Shrines: Based on the act of remembrance for the recently deceased. Dark shrines are often located close to or at the scene of a death, and usually within a short period after the incident which led to the death. Roadside tributes of flowers laid to commemorate death through traffic accidents have become increasingly popular in this country. Media-reported deaths of significance for people can also lead to similar informal tributes, as in the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Initially non-commercialised, these dark shrines are often relocated and become far more commercially oriented, as in the Diana memorial at Althorp House, near Northampton, England (http://www.althorp.com/house/). Other examples are Ground Zero, New York (site of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, destroyed on what has become known as 9/11), also Marc Bolan's shrine at the spot where he died in a road accident in 1977. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolan%27s_Rock_Shrine)
6. Dark Conflict Sites: War and battlefields fit into this category and their use as tourism sites have been known about for centuries. Tourists are recorded as having visited the scene of the Battle of Waterloo even as it was being fought in 1815. The battlefields of the First World War were also first visited soon after hostilities ended (http://www.firstworldwar.com/tours/firsttours.htm) (http://www.battlefield-tours.com/) and are now well established tourism venues, but their purpose is more about remembrance than celebration. Here, education is mixed with paying respect to those killed in conflict, locating the scene of relatives' deaths, and contemplating the meaning and value of death on a mass scale. But local authorities and entrepreneurs in more recent war zones may envy the business opportunities of commercial gain rather than learning.

Visiting a Nazi concentration camp must be one of the most disturbing tours you can take. Image copyright: John Beech, from IELIT.

1. Dark Camps of Genocide: Seen as occupying the darkest edges of the dark tourism spectrum, death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau (see Touring a Concentration Camp) http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,338820,00.html) and Buchenwald attract thousands of visitors each year (600 000 people visit Auschwitz annually, Dachau 700 000 and Buchenwald 600 000). These tourist 'attractions' are as much about people's needs never to forget the evil perpetrated there, as they are about a commercial product.

Source: The Dark Tourism Product: Seven Dark Suppliers (taken from Stone P. (2006) A Dark Tourism Spectrum, accessed from the Dark Tourism Forum, January 18th 2007.