They offered very little luxury and relaxation, and encouraged drinking a great deal of seawater to purge bodily ills and leaping frequently into the frigid waves from horse-drawn bathing machines.Ī more decadent understanding of seaside entertainment caught on in the mid-19th century, when the tiny principality of Monaco was nearly bankrupt, and Princess Caroline, the enterprising wife of the hapless Prince Florestan, of the ruling Grimaldi clan, had an idea. But these attempts at the beach resort were somewhat unpleasant and chilly. In 1753 a doctor named Richard Russell moved to the old Saxon town of Brighton, on the south coast of England, and built a guesthouse for himself and his patients, setting off a little craze that spread across the channel to places like Trouville and Cabourg (which Marcel Proust reinvented in his fiction as Balbec). When she survived by swimming away, he had one of his henchmen finish the botched job later that night.įor a long time after the Romans, the concept of the luxury beach resort disappeared, resurfacing in altered form when the English upper classes, grown weary of their inland spas, began to be seduced by the curative properties of cold ocean water. Stodola tells us that “the world’s first known seaside resort” was Baiae, near Naples, where Romans from the first to fourth centuries created an opulent and wild party town that the philosopher Seneca called “a hostelry of vices.” There, Stodola goes scuba diving to explore the submerged half of the ancient city, with its intricately decorated geothermal baths and saunas and a nymphaeum, which she describes as “a sanctuary room dedicated to water.” During its heyday, Baiae was a debauched playground for emperors it was, in fact, where the emperor Nero tried to murder his own mother, Agrippina, by putting her on a boat designed to self-destruct beneath her as it floated off.
I’ve gleefully stored away this factoid about the Situationists, along with many others that come from Sarah Stodola’s new book, The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit, and Peril at the Beach, a sharp and exhaustive examination of the history and pitfalls of luxury beach resorts all over the world. Henry Wismayer: A travel writer envisions a future without vacations The Situationists, as usual, said it best in Paris in the spring of 1968, when, in protest of capitalism, they scrawled graffiti reading CLUB MED: A CHEAP HOLIDAY IN OTHER PEOPLE’S MISERY. The entire time that we’re in our ostensible paradise, I’m busy obsessing over the unintended consequences of our stay, such as the environmental degradation caused by bringing wasteful tourists to delicate ecosystems and the racist and classist issues of displacement. But for catastrophists like me, the luxury beach resort raises a whole new set of psychological torments on top of those provided by more ordinary beaches.
I married into a family of generous people who are also horrifying extroverts, and whose notion of a good time is a nice, boozy, mostly reclined stay on some tropical island together. When I have gone on beach vacations, it’s been under duress. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.