Paradise comes in waves as beach resorts come in and out of style

Prototypical gorgeous beach resort

In the first part of my look into author Sarah Stodola's The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit, and Peril at the Beach, I covered her history of beach and resort culture. But how did all these places become our idea of "paradise?"

Take Nicaragua, Nobody ever visited there as a tourist because, from 1937 to 1979, it was led by a series of dictators. Daniel Ortega became the leader in the 1980s but those dictators didn’t just go away. They became the U.S.-backed Contras and civil war unfolded. So it took many more years before the Central America's gorgeous beaches gave way to opening as the locale of hotels and resorts. Then it stook still more years for Nicaraguans to understand the ways of customer service. Ortega recently came back into office and proceeded to raise taxes, sparking protests and deadly crackdowns followed by a bad bungling of the Covid crisis. It appears Nicaragua’s tourism surge may have unfortunately been short-lived.

The beautiful beaches and great surfing of Senegal, on Africa’s western-most side, have a different story. People don’t think to go there because they figure it’s so far away. But really, the country is a seven-hour direct flight from New York City. So an even bigger factor in Senegal's struggle to become a tourism destination may be the cost of the flight, which is typically about double the cost of flights from the U.S. to Europe.

Actually, Senegal was the top tourism country in sub-Saharan Africa alongside Kenya up until the 1980s, but a separatist movement and then a president who deprioritized tourism has left a once-glowing Club Med and other properties to pretty much crumble. Another need that’s been identified is for Senegal to become knowledgeable about marketing itself as a tourist destination. Not only does a potential workforce not yet have the fundamentals of customer service once the crowd would arrive, but the country’s tourism marketing infrastructure (including a pretty inactive government agency of tourism promotion) has yet to be established. Other problems with going to Senegal include the costly and unreliable forms of traveling once in the country, the lack of online services for things like travel booking, and the high costs of good things like cheese that have to be imported from places like France. 

In Stodola's section about Tulum, Ibiza, and Cancun, she laments the places that have lost their paradise status. Starting in the 1980s, a flood of travelers began descending on Tulum, south of Cancun on the east side of Mexico, for its fine white sand beaches and “water of a color that writers have long strained to describe fittingly.” Tourism there began as lodging in grass huts with a hammock for sleeping at the low rate of $10 per night. Daytrippers would visit the nearby Mayan ruins. In 2003, an Argentinian model opened Coqui Coqui - no longer in business - and the New York fashion industry made Tulum a major destination. Now you might spend $50 for some nachos and guacamole. 

One of the many consequences of massive growth and development is that wastewater is taken from the resorts and dumped in the jungle, creating a groundwater that spreads disease far and wide through the vast river system in the area. Instead of relying on the latest advances, 1950s technology is being recreated there, the engineers are not learning from history and even much of the marketing hails Tulum as super eco-friendly. Waste could be turned into a sellable commodity, such as energy, if it was concentrated and contained, but instead it is being dumped into the ocean and other waterways.

At party beach resorts, like most of the ones in Ibiza, people are looking for ecstasy over paradise, and much of the action takes place indoors in the clubs rather than out on the beaches, which are mainly relegated to daytime-hangover spots. These Ibiza nightclubs were launched in the 1970s as a direct reaction to Club Meds heading the family route. Debauchery continues apace in infamous foam, paint, and suds parties. 

While Ibiza and other scenes were first forming for Europe’s youthful parties, “middle-class teens with disposable income came of age” in the U.S. in the 1960s and headed to Fort Lauderdale. In the 1980s that changed to Daytona Beach, with help from MTV. Once the U.S. coasts filled up, inspired by that new cable station's airing of the debauchery happening down in Florida, kids started looking further afield to places like Cancun. 

Club Med

In Cancun, absolutely nothing more than coconuts existed before 1970. It was entirely a planned resort. There was no Cancun before the Mexican government invented this plan for a place with ideal climate and fewer hurricanes than other places. Now there are much more frequent hurricanes, there are daily truckloads of beach sargassum that is undoubtedly mistaken for seaweed rather than the sea life-killing wastewater mutant weed that it is, there is the dying reef hidden offshore, and there is the scary beach erosion being caused by the aggressive development of high rises. 

Club Med, which I admittedly had a blast at in Puna Canta, Dominican Republic in April 2023 (in my first-ever all-inclusive adventure), was launched in Salerno, Italy in 1954. That had ballooned to 64 Club Meds across the globe by 1972. The company changed, as I've noted, from its more partying early image to being family friendly at beaches and ski mountains. All-inclusive resorts have Club Med leading the way but many other companies have gotten aboard that train and the concept is found just about everywhere.