Toledo, in the near future. The historic center has been practically emptied of its inhabitants. A few elderly people and a handful of romantics who refuse to leave their homes are struggling to resist. It should be noted that these are romantics of a certain age and purchasing power, because the few young people who would like to live in the city cannot afford the exorbitant rents. The elderly in the area are finding it increasingly difficult to move around the narrow streets crowded with tourists. In addition, the lack of elevators and the absence of day centers (the last one closed many years ago) do not encourage the elderly to leave their homes either. Traditional commerce disappeared decades ago, swallowed up by the large shopping centers located on the outskirts of the city. Only a few supermarkets survive in the city express scattered among countless ice cream parlors, burger joints, pizzerias and cheap convenience stores. memory. In the past, it was common to find a fellow countryman on Ancha Street going to the bank or an official organization to do something, but now citizens have to manage everything online.
In return, he is very likely to come across individuals dressed in coarse fabric blouses, leggings and hooded tunics, since the city hall has distributed licenses so that medieval markets can be permanently set up throughout the Moorish layout of the city. To create an atmosphere, they say. An experience that tourists can enrich through gamification: Using augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), they participate in interactive games that lead them to explore the city in a playful way, adapting it to their different interests and ages. One can immerse oneself in an immersive experience in the Tulaytulah of Al-Mamun or attend a chariot race in the Roman circus as a spectator. The cloistered convents have long been empty (we still don’t know what to do with them), so if you pass a friar or nun on the street, it is very likely that they are extras in a production of. Netflix or another major platform streaming. If anyone is curious enough to ask the few indigenous walkers, they will tell you that Only one thing has not changed in Toledo: the Tagus is still an open sewer..
But the important thing is that Toledo is fashionable and appears more and more in the media. Puy du Fou theme parkalmost completed in all its phases (there is a fear that if it continues to grow at this rate, the dream of Toledo will end up swallowing the reality of Toledo), has broken its own record: four and a half million visitors in the last year. It is not for nothing that it has been chosen for the umpteenth consecutive time as the best theme park in the world. The municipal authorities, excited by the figures, are rubbing their hands, because Toledo has also recorded a historical record: until the month of July alone, more than two million people have chosen the city of the Tagus as a tourist destination. They are so satisfied that they have promised new audiovisual shows to the people of Toledo and their visitors.
It is still striking that Artificial Generative Intelligence (AGI), which analyzes huge volumes of data and was supposed to offer personalized recommendations based on the preferences of each tourist, ended up proposing the same destinations and the same activities. The expectations that new technologies could help to better distribute the tourist flow, avoiding the saturation of the most popular places and promoting alternative destinations, have failed miserably. The gregarious factor of our species, so developed in mass society, does not seem to have been sufficiently analyzed by its algorithms. Finally, despite the personalized interactive stories downloaded to their phones, social media platforms and travel apps will share the same digital memories.
The authorities remain concerned about the housing problem, however, because The hotels cannot cope, both those built within the theme park itself and those that have proliferated throughout the city.in the city and outside the walls, highlighting the ultramodern hotel built next to the Cava bridge (a work as ambitious as it is misunderstood that earned the team of architects who designed it a prestigious international award). A problem that can only be solved with the granting of new licenses. For this reason, the number of tourist apartments has never been completely regulated, so that a good part of the habitable houses (the rest is an accessory of plastered facades empty inside) are intended for the use and enjoyment of the tourists who visit us.
Another problem that affects both the macro theme park and the city of Toledo is the heat. Due to the rise in temperatures due to a climate change that some claim does not exist, the municipal authorities have done what the managers of the neighboring park have done: cover the main streets with awnings and install steam air conditioners and nebulizers to cool the air. But the heat does not discourage the tens of thousands of tourists who arrive every day in the imperial city in caravans from Madrid. The capital’s tour operators must reserve a place at the different viewpoints on the Valley road to enjoy the panoramic view. The influx of vehicles is such that the authorities have only expanded the parking lots and bus interchanges near the city, so that Toledo, especially when arriving from the northeast, increasingly resembles a gigantic tourist and cultural hypermarket surrounded by a huge asphalt parking lot. And it’s fortunate after all that a significant portion of potential travelers have stayed at home, making do with virtual tours via AR and VR.
Toledofiction: it is not only the title of this kind of tourist dystopia that we have imagined for Toledo. It also refers to city model that seems to inspire the actions of our political and cultural heroes. Does the daily reality of the few inhabitants who still resist in the municipality matter? Are the daily inconveniences of these heroic Toledoans taken into account? In this entertainment society that always distracts us from the essential, what matters is fiction, simulacrum, scenery: in a word, the spectacle. In reality, our era has a certain aversion to reality. Above all, because of historical reality. And in Toledo, the weight (and rhythm) of history is all too evident. Lovers of current events, we only support history when we experience it as fiction. This attention deficit so characteristic of our era and which is associated with a lifestyle that tends to unfold virtually, always leads to a deficit of reality, with the consequence of the inability to address people’s real problems. If the interests of the tourism industry continue to prevail over the needs of the people of Toledo, before we know it, our city will end up resembling the dystopian picture we have painted in these lines.
