One must, I suppose, offer a polite round of applause. The oracle has spoken, the die is cast, and the perfectly adequate Greek island of Naxos has been anointed by the World Travel Market as the globe’s premier destination for
- The news arrives, as these things do, with the sober statistical fanfare of a 30.9% increase in air arrivals. One imagines the island’s ancient marble lions, weathered by millennia of sun and myth, raising a stony eyebrow at the sudden influx of boarding passes and Instagram tripods. The criteria, we are told, are golden beaches, clear blue waters, charming villages, a ‘family-friendly atmosphere’, and ‘rich cultural heritage’. A checklist, in other words, so impeccably Mediterranean it might have been generated by a particularly efficient algorithm yearning for a summer holiday.
It is a peculiarly modern form of alchemy, this transformation of place into product, of landscape into laurel. One recalls, with a certain weary irony, the fate of other such ‘best’ destinations. The Croatian coast, once a whispered secret among yachting cognoscenti, now groaning under the weight of cruise ship days; the temples of Angkor Wat, their predawn serenity shattered by the orchestrated rustle of designer athleisure wear. The coronation by WTM is less a discovery than a diagnosis—a pinpointing of the next patient in the global tourism contagion. The symptoms are all there: the rising flight metrics, the PR-friendly adjectives, the promise of an authenticity that is, by the very nature of its proclamation, already beginning to curdle.
Naxos, to be fair, has the pedigree for the role. It is the largest of the Cyclades, a substantial, wheat-growing, marble-quarrying entity in a sea of smaller, more frivolous siblings. It has the ruins to brood over, the villages to meander through, the requisite azure that photographers call ‘Instagram blue’. Its family-friendly aura suggests a certain resistance to the Dionysian excesses of its neighbour Mykonos—a virtue, no doubt, though one can’t help but feel it’s rather like being praised for being the sensible sibling at a riotous party. The charm, one suspects, has always lain in its comparative obscurity, its status as a place one went *after
- the more famous islands, for a dose of the real. That, of course, is now terminally compromised. The ‘real’ is the first casualty of the ‘best’.
This global hunger for the certified, pre-approved experience speaks to a profound contemporary anxiety. In an age of infinite choice and paralyzing indecision, we outsource our desires to the committee, the listicle, the market report. We seek not to discover, but to collect. To have ‘done’ the best. It is the tourism of the tick-box, a frantic pilgrimage to sites of someone else’s making. From the overtourism protests in Barcelona to the ‘last chance tourism’ melting the glaciers of Iceland, the pattern is clear: we love a place to death, armed with little more than a recommendation and a desperate need to prove we were there before it was, inevitably, ruined.
So what, then, for Naxos? The increase in arrivals is not merely a number; it is a tide that will reshape the shoreline. The charming village must expand its car park. The family-run taverna must consider a QR code menu. The golden beach will require more sun-loungers, the clear blue waters more regulations. The cultural heritage will be packaged into two-hour guided tours, the melancholic clarity of a Cycladic sunset framed by the silhouettes of selfie sticks. This is not a critique of the islanders, who will doubtless navigate the influx with the pragmatic grace their ancestors reserved for invading empires. It is an observation of the machine in which they, and we, are all now cogwheels.
Perhaps the true, sharp irony lies in the timing:
- A destination anointed two years in advance, its future popularity pre-sold, its serenity already discounted. One is reminded of the traveller who books a ‘remote, untouched’ eco-lodge only to find it fully booked. The contradiction is the point. We yearn for the unspoilt, but our collective yearning is the very force that spoils.
In the end, Naxos will endure, as it has endured Romans, Venetians, and backpackers. Its marble will still gleam, its mountains will still catch the late afternoon light. But it will have joined the peculiar pantheon of the officially wonderful, a status that confers not immortality, but a kind of living embalment. The traveller in search of a soul might, with a hint of British perversity, now look elsewhere. To the island next door, perhaps, or the one that didn’t make the list. For the greatest luxury left to us in this hyper-connected, hyper-curated world is not a five-star view of a ‘best’ beach, but the quiet, subversive thrill of finding nothing more—and nothing less—than what you were never told to look for.
