International Tourism and Economic Modernization

The drive for modernization was a common trope for both Romania and Spain in the postwar period. In both countries, the rhetoric of modernization was connected with the desire to catch up with the developed West. As both Romania and Spain regarded themselves as developing countries, the “West” became the standard against which they measured their economic development. The rise of mass tourism in the late 1950s and early 1960s provided an opportunity to level the playing field with Northwestern European countries, from which most tourists were coming. However, in both Romania and Spain, the growth of the tourist industry was a convoluted process tied to broader domestic policies and economic thinking, which involved a shift from the relative isolation of the early to mid-1950s to the more open economic policy of the 1960s. When it came to international tourism during this time, specialists in both countries learned the language of the market economy despite the planned economy in Romania and the rather proto-capitalist economy of Spain. Moreover, with the help of international tourism, both countries reintegrated into the global economy sometime between the mid-1950s and early1960s and gradually moved from the periphery of Europe to become active players in the European tourism market.

And indeed, throughout the 1960s, elites in Romania began to conceive of international tourism as a modernizing force that could shore up the rest of the economy and open the country to the capitalist West. From the late 1950s until the mid-1970s, Romania built the scaffold of a tourism industry.²² The 1961 meeting in Moscow opened the way for tourism from the capitalist West into socialist Eastern Europe, and Romania was among the beneficiaries of this new policy. In the aftermath of the meeting, the Politburo of the Romanian Communist Party asked for a report about the number of visitors from capitalist countries, but the findings were not very promising. More than anything else, this report reflected the Romanian government’s lack of experience with tourism. After acknowledging an increase in the number of Western tourists holidaying in socialist Romania from 7,800 in 1957 to 20,000 in 1961, the report examined how other socialist countries welcomed Western tourists.²³ Most examples were drawn from Bulgaria, Romania’s southern neighbor. While in Bulgaria tourists were offered guided tours to help them familiarize themselves with the country’s history and the resorts, in Romania tourists visited selected collective farms, usually ending with a dinner party with “comrades.”²⁴

In the mid-1960s, however, increasing international tourism became a priority for the communist government. In 1964, the National Office for Tourism–Carpathians (ONT–Carpathians) decided to send a number of tourist workers for specialized training in France.²⁵ The ONT–Carpathians sent tourist workers to France in the hope that they would become acquainted with French cuisine and then use this knowledge to improve the menus of Romanian restaurants. This effort was meant to attract more Western tourists because food became one important aspect of tourist promotion.²⁶ Then, in 1967, it eliminated visas for tourists from capitalist countries for the International Tourist Year.²⁷ An internal note from the Economic Directorate of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party recommended the following measures:

To boost commercial activities and the professional/technical level of commercial workers, it is necessary to send them abroad in order to get acquainted with the practices of commerce in other countries. Therefore, we recommend the following actions:

• To send 15 bakers, pastry cooks, butchers, and grill cooks to France for a one- to three-month period.
• For the school year term 1964/1965, six students in tourism will study in a hotel/restaurant training school in Paris.
• We are negotiating with the International [Hotel & Restaurant] Association to send waiters, hotel workers, and chefs in various countries for six months.
• To invite French tourist specialists to visit Romania in the following months in order to train Romanian students and restaurant workers.²⁸

In 1965, during a meeting of the Politburo of the Romanian Communist Party, a concrete plan for the development of tourism was put forth.²⁹ The proposal was part of a broader five-year plan for the economic development of Romania between 1966 and 1970, which summed up the main directions and strategies that were to be implemented. Put together by the ONT–Carpathians after consultations with the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Domestic Trade, and the State Committee for Planning, the plan’s goal was to streamline the development of tourism in Romania. The meeting concluded that international tourism has a high economic efficiency, comparable with industries that produce goods to be exported to capitalist countries.³⁰ To support their arguments, participants at the meeting offered concrete numbers: in 1965, one million foreign tourists visited Romania compared to only 200,000 in 1960, while the revenue from international tourism had increased from 34.4 million lei valuta in 1960 to 117 million lei valuta in 1965.³¹ Despite this sharp growth, international tourism still accounted for less revenue than domestic tourism, which brought in 48.7 million lei in 1960 and 196 million lei in 1965.³² However, as the report pointed out, the most economically profitable growth was the hard currency income from Western tourists. While in 1960 Western tourists contributed 5.3 million lei to the Romanian budget, in the next five years this amount increased sixteen-fold, reaching 88 million lei in 1965.³³ The final report proposed an investment in tourism of three billion lei, of which 2.3 billion lei were allocated for international tourism, although it mentioned that Romanian tourists could use hotels outside the tourist season and when they were not fully occupied by foreign tourists.³⁴

In the mid-1960s, Romanian tourist officials carefully observed changes in the world tourist market. In 1966, a report by the Ministry of Exterior Commerce emphasized that the number of West German and Scandinavian tourists was on the rise in both Europe and Romania and that Romanian tourist advertising should attempt to attract these particular tourists.³⁵ Consequently, promotional materials about Romanian tourism began to present Romania as a familiar space despite Cold War divisions.

In addition to sending tourist workers to train in Western countries and observing the market, Romania gradually formed a new definition of tourism at the end of the 1960s. Besides the recuperative aspect of tourism, thinking about tourism started to encompass an economic dimension as well. It ceased to simply be an activity that improved Romanian workers’ physical condition; henceforth, it became a set of services designed to meet the needs of potential consumers.³⁶ Oskar Snak, a high official in the Ministry of Tourism and a scholar of tourism, explained: “From an economic and social point of view, the development of tourism refers to the population’s growing demands for better access to tourist services and consumer goods, which in the end, stimulates both production and consumption.”³⁷

Snak further emphasized that the growing number of “foreign visitors is beneficial for the development of certain tourist areas and of the Romanian economy in general.”³⁸ More than that, he noted that “international tourism can positively influence a country’s balance of payments, capitalize on a country’s natural resources,” and act as “an invisible form of exporting services and products, which is very economically advantageous.”³⁹ The shift from tourism for workers to tourism as an active element in the balance of payments illustrates the turn in socialist Romania’s views throughout the 1960s. Snak’s remarks put Romanian tourism in sync with countries with a more advanced tourist industry in Southern Europe.

Although Romania was part of socialist Eastern Europe, as of the mid-1960s Romanian tourist planners began to claim some autonomy within the Eastern Bloc and from the Soviet Union. This was part of a broader development that involved a political and economic rift with the Soviet Union that started in 1964. Initially, Romania had acted as an obedient follower of the Soviet Union, taking an active role in suppressing the Hungarian uprising in 1956. But in the late 1950s, as more Western-oriented political leaders (such as Gogu Rădulescu, minister of interior commerce as of 1956; Ion Gheorghe Maurer, minister of foreign affairs as of 1957 and prime minister between 1961 and 1974; and even the younger Nicolae Ceaușescu) came to power, Romania’s position in relation to the Soviet Union gradually changed as Romania started to seek the attention of Western countries. A 1964 article in the New York Times, “Romania Widens Rift with Soviets,” noted the change.⁴⁰ Besides criticizing Radio Moscow for misinforming Romanian citizens about the country’s “economic independence” and relations with the West, the Romanian government offered Western tourists a better currency exchange rate and relaxed travel restrictions. Furthermore, in the late 1960s, Romania applied for membership in the nonaligned group of nations at the United Nations World Trade Conference in Geneva and approached the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which was mostly composed of capitalist countries.⁴¹ With these bold moves the Romanian government aimed to show that its overtures toward the capitalist West were merely a measure of its pragmatic economic approach.⁴²

As in Romania, the 1960s proved decisive for Spanish tourism. In a 1962 article in Hostelería y Turismo, the Spanish Ministry of Finance acknowledged that “Tourism is for Spain one of the main sources of income, which boosts the Spanish economy. Although tourism is ‘invisible’ divisas, its contribution to commerce and industry, along with the stimulation of creativity and its role in advertising our way of life, makes tourism worthy of the attention of the government, but also of private entities, which also benefit from supporting it.”⁴³ This statement mirrored the thinking beyond tourism development in Spain in the 1960s. Manuel Fraga, head of the Ministry of Information and Tourism, fostered the conviction that tourism could support overall economic development and modernization. Indeed, international tourism did become the backbone of Spain’s economic development. From an economic sector that grew because of foreign tourists’ interest in sunbathing in inexpensive places and private entrepreneurs’ desire to capitalize on this interest, in the 1960s, international tourism finally caught the attention of the state.

For tourism, as for the whole Spanish economy, the turning point was the 1959 Stabilization Plan. According to a Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ report from 1963, “After Spain adopted the Stabilization Plan in 1959, a brief economic decline followed in 1960, while in 1961, the Spanish economy began to pick up and showed much promise.”⁴⁴ This was in contrast to the “perilous” situation that had characterized the Spanish economy in 1958, just before the plan was devised.⁴⁵ One of the economic sectors that boomed in 1961 was foreign trade and, within it, international tourism. In 1959, tourism was already a key economic sector, with the number of tourists increasing yearly between 1951 and 1958 by 16.1 percent.⁴⁶ But after the plan was adopted in April 1959, the surge accelerated. Between 1958 and 1963, there was a 145 percent increase in the number of tourists who visited Spain, compared to a growth of 60 percent in France, 32 percent in Italy, and only 17 percent in West Germany.⁴⁷ The fast growth rate continued throughout the first half of the 1960s, until in 1965 out of an expected 16 million tourists, only 14 million arrived.⁴⁸ The spontaneous growth of tourism in Spain came to a halt, and the state realized that it had to take more serious measures in order to attract tourists because other tourist destinations in the Mediterranean and Black Sea region, such as Portugal, Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Romania, had begun to emerge.

In 1968, Julio Alcaide Inchausti, director of the brand-new Institute for Tourist Studies, evaluated Spanish tourism and emphasized the importance of the Mediterranean region and Spain’s growing share of the tourist industry.⁴⁹ The article showed that the number of tourists in Europe and the Mediterranean region had increased fivefold between 1950 and 1965.⁵⁰ Spain was one of the beneficiaries of this increase. While in 1950 only 750,000 tourists spent their vacations in Spain, by 1964 their numbers had increased to 11,691,000.⁵¹ Although this was a staggering performance, the article warned that Spain could lose this momentum, as some changes within the increasingly competitive Mediterranean tourist market were expected. Inchausti predicted that other Mediterranean countries besides France and Italy, such as Greece, Turkey, and Yugoslavia, could become important tourist destinations. He anticipated that these countries would have a 2 percent increase in tourists per annum if they adopted a “moderate aggressive policy” and even a 4 percent increase in the case of a “more aggressive” tourist policy.⁵² The article warned that this prediction called for immediate measures from the Spanish government, which had to preserve Spain’s initial tourist growth.

Throughout the 1960s, the Spanish state did become more involved. One way to influence tourist development was through planning. In 1962, the Commissariat for the Development of Planning was created as part of the Office for Economic Coordination and Planning. It aimed to coordinate the proposed three-year Development Plans (Planes de Desarrollo) between 1964 and 1975.⁵³ Inspired in part by the five-year Soviet development plans but with an eye to recently introduced planning in France, the development plans were meant to direct investments to key sectors while ensuring that certain economic indicators were met. Besides agriculture, transportation, and industry, tourism was also a priority for both the government and the planners. For the second development plan an investment of 41.2 million pesetas was planned for the development of accommodations, because lodging amenities were insufficient to cope with the growing number of tourists.⁵⁴ This created an imbalance, and in the 1960s Spain had only slightly more than one-third of Italy’s accommodation capacity while welcoming a comparable number of tourists.⁵⁵ This suggests that a considerable number of tourists in Spain lived in unregistered private homes. While the government attempted to increase the number of beds in hotels, what warranted the investment was the hard currency that tourists brought to Spain. In 1968, the governor of the National Bank stated that revenues from international tourism covered 35 percent of the country’s imports and 50 percent of its foreign trade deficit.⁵⁶

But the rapid development of tourism in Spain contributed to social, economic, and ecological imbalances that the Spanish state was striving to resolve. In response to these disparities, the state approved a 1963 law for tourist areas. The law was based on a study put together by the Institute for Tourist Studies (Turespaña), which emphasized that

[t]he development of international tourism has led to an increase in the number of seasonal workers, especially in the coastal regions. These areas’ high numbers of seasonal workers triggered several hurdles that jeopardized urban development. Among these, we mention the lack of suitable housing, of proper public transportation, or of a sewage system along with the frenzied erecting of new homes, sometimes even without a building permit.⁵⁷

Among the solutions proposed was the establishment of new tourist areas so as to unclog the existing tourist towns and to develop new tourist regions where “agriculture and industry are not sustainable.”⁵⁸ The law for tourist areas approved in December 1963 addressed these suggestions; its main objective became that of “coordinating tourism in the national territory with respect to planning and development of Centers and Areas of Tourist Interest.”⁵⁹ However, the plan had limited success. Foreign tourists continued to flock primarily to the coastal areas, which saw the most economic and demographic growth. In 1968, an article by Ángel Alcaide acknowledged the impact of tourism on coastal areas. While the population grew by 10 percent in Tarragona and by 15 percent in Palma (the capital of Mallorca) between 1961 and 1966, it only rose by 1.2 percent in Lleida, an up-country town in Catalonia.⁶⁰ During the same period, the population of twenty-three towns in Spain declined, particularly because these towns did not manage to capitalize on tourism development.⁶¹

Besides attempting to use tourism to harmonize economic development, state planners also put together a coherent promotion plan to advertise Spain as a tourist destination. The government regularly informed the general public about the impressive number of visitors and the revenues they brought, which had a reciprocal effect as it both helped attract more tourists and motivated Spaniards to welcome tourists. Spain’s tourist promotion was its trump card. Under the slogan “Spain is Different,” the Ministry of Information and Tourism sought to build a desirable image of Spain in the eyes of foreign tourists. The campaign portrayed Spain as an idyllic place with sunny beaches and stunning landscapes. It did not mention the country’s dictatorial regime. In 1964, the Ministry of Information and Tourism initiated a comprehensive promotional campaign, noting that “No previous campaign underwent such a strong promotion.”⁶² State tourist offices abroad and private tourist agencies were called upon to analyze the markets in their respective countries and to find ways to attract tourists. Most foreign tourists who visited Spain came from Great Britain, West Germany, and the United States. In 1964, 1,182 articles in newspapers and magazines were published in Great Britain, 1,830 in the United States, and 2,014 in West Germany to promote Spanish tourism.⁶³ By the late 1960s, Spain had opened thirty-one tourist offices abroad, and in 1967 alone it published 151 brochures in 11,382,500 copies and 40 color posters in 870,000 copies.⁶⁴ The role of tourist offices abroad was to promote Spain as a tourist destination and signal what might become eventual issues in that sector. For instance, in the late 1960s, de Las Casas Acevedo, the head of the tourist office in Paris, complained that France did not have a centralized tourist office, and often the packages sold by French tourist agencies were more expensive than individual vacations that tourists organized themselves, which rendered collaboration with these agencies useless.⁶⁵

In 1966, photographer Xavier Miserachs published the photo book Costa Brava Show as part of the Spanish state’s promotional campaign. The photo album was laced with irony and integrated elements of the brand-new pop movement, which made it highly appealing to young people.⁶⁶ Yet, although a winner on the culture war front, Spain did receive some criticism that was linked to its authoritarian political regime. A 1967 Swedish erotic drama film, I Am Curious (Yellow), centers on a young activist woman in Stockholm who interviews people in the street about the morality of spending their vacations in Spain.⁶⁷ Although the film enjoyed significant success in the United States, the dissenting message did not seem to significantly affect the flow of US tourists to Spain.⁶⁸

In the 1960s, the Spanish state became increasingly involved in the development of tourism and control over private operators. For instance, every tourist agency was supposed to be approved by the Ministry of Information and Tourism, not only to ensure it offered reliable services, but also so the state could assert control over who opened a tourism business. Similarly, prices for accommodation and food were kept so Spain would remain an attractive tourist destination.

This brief comparison of Romania’s and Spain’s approaches to developing tourism warrants three observations. First, despite their dictatorial regimes, both countries aimed at modernizing their economies and societies. Their respective visions of modernization concurred as both countries regarded the capitalist West as a development model in terms of production and living standards. Yet the ways in which these common goals were to be attained differed. While the state was the leading force in Romania, in Spain it was both the state and the private sector. Romania had a centralized planned economy in which the state was not only the owner of means of production but also planned and decided on how to redistribute resources, whereas Spain had a bureaucratic economic system in which the state played the role of a coordinator. Planning was meant to rationally distribute resources in order to generate development, but the Spanish state kept a firm grip on private firms. Every business had to be preapproved by various state institutions, sometimes at the central level. For instance, regarding tourism, every tourist agency had to receive authorization from the Ministry of Information and Tourism, which involved a protracted bureaucratic procedure.⁶⁹

Second, the rapid growth of tourism in both countries was striking. Spanish tourism soared at a considerable rate from 1950 to 1964 compared to its Mediterranean neighbors France and Italy, while French tourists became one of the most numerous groups in Spain. The explanation for this increase in the number of tourists lies in Spain’s inexpensive tourist programs and, to a certain extent, its exoticism and novelty in the eye of some European and world tourists. Both factors transformed it into a desirable tourist destination.⁷⁰ Throughout the 1960s, Romania also had a speedy tourist development. Between 1965 and 1970, the number of tourist arrivals in Romania increased by 48 percent, while the European average was 7.3 percent.⁷¹ But the two countries assessed tourist markets according to different criteria. While Spain focused on the countries or regions to which tourists flowed, Romania focused on those countries that sent the most tourists. Here lay a crucial difference in the way that tourism planning took place: while Spain was looking at its competitors and devised an aggressive policy toward those countries, Romania, primarily because of its location farther away from the more affluent Western European tourists, chose to plan how to attract these travelers carefully. In the mid-1960s, the advent of charter flights partially resolved this inconvenience.

Third, in terms of postwar geopolitics, including socialist Yugoslavia among the countries that could compete with Spain, there was another dimension to the geographical division of Europe, which went beyond the established idea of a capitalist West pitted against the socialist East (or vice versa).⁷² There was another division based on the tourist flow that connected Northwestern Europe, acting as a sender of tourists, and coastal areas (the Mediterranean and the Black Sea Coasts in this case), acting as the receiver of tourists.

A simple look at the number of tourists visiting each country and the ways in which socialist Romania and Francoist Spain positioned themselves geographically on the tourist market shows the divergent approaches of the two countries. Despite the clear advantage of Spain’s geographical position in attracting a higher number of tourists, Romania’s planners displayed a different approach to the tourist market, which was rooted in its attempt to create some political distance from the Soviet Union and become attractive to Western tourists.⁷³ Romania’s potential market was quite broad. Because of its geographical location in the coveted Mediterranean region, Spain’s focus was rather regional. However, one must note that neither country’s tourism officials were concerned with the ideological divisions between the capitalist West and socialist East. Their vision of tourist geography was determined by who their competitors were or by where the tourists were coming from.

From Trains to Cars and Airplanes: Creating a Pan-European and Global Transportation Network

Besides a clear vision on tourism and a realistic assessment of the tourist market, an efficient transportation network was a key factor in the development of international tourism. Both Romanian and Spanish tourist officials were well aware of this fact. In both cases, the state was the main entrepreneur when it came to transportation, but the nature of decision-making and the allocation of funds worked differently in each country. While in Romania the centralized system allowed for a clear prioritization and channeling of resources to designated economic sectors, in Spain the Ministry of Tourism had to negotiate with the Ministry of Public Works and other government offices regarding the allocation of necessary funds. Although transportation was a hurdle that both countries needed to overcome, despite the advantages of a planned economy, and after having shown a promising start in the 1960s, Romania deemphasized investments in the transportation sector in the 1980s.⁷⁴

Julian Hale, a British writer who visited Romania in 1967, wrote: “Touring Romania by car, I found out that I have a simple choice, I could take the asphalted main roads, keep my temper and miss out on the remoter places of interest. Or, I could, and indeed did, also venture on to the dent-making, ‘corrugated’ secondary roads, which are dusty when dry and treacherously muddy after rain. It pays to have a map which distinguishes between the two.”⁷⁵

If touring Romania by car at the end of the 1960s was often a less comfortable experience than many foreign tourists would have expected, reaching it from various corners of Europe was far from difficult. This was just a matter of time and personal funds, especially after the visa requirements for Western countries were eased in 1964. A 1967 guidebook of Romania lavishly presented the transportation choices that a potential tourist had at his disposal. First of all, Romania could be reached by plane, as it was connected with eighteen European cities, ten of which were in capitalist countries.⁷⁶ In addition to TAROM, the Romanian national airline company,⁷⁷ foreign airlines, such as Air France, Lufthansa, KLM, Austrian Airlines, Malev (Hungary), AEROFLOT, and LOT (Poland), had daily or biweekly flights to Romania. Another way of visiting the country was by train. The 1967 guidebook listed eight possible tours that included Romania, five of which had stops in both socialist and capitalist countries.⁷⁸ Romania could also be easily reached by car. Tourists could enter with their own car and drive without any special documentation for three months. Although not required by Romanian law, the 1967 guidebook recommended that drivers have their logbooks (official papers) when traveling to Eastern Europe in order to avoid unnecessary bureaucratic hassles.⁷⁹ Finally, Romania could be reached by boat either on the Danube or through the Black Sea. Besides a Romanian state-initiated boat trip on the Danube from Vienna to Hârșova,⁸⁰ there were three regular cruises from Germany, Spain, or Sweden, which included the Black Sea Coast city of Constanța in their travel itineraries.⁸¹ As the traveling options listed above show, in the late 1960s Romania was part of the European travel network and could be easily visited by both East and West European tourists. After all, the same 1967 guidebook informed British tourists taking a road trip to Romania that they could reach the Black Sea Coast in less than 48 hours.⁸²

If getting to Romania was easy, moving within Romania was a different matter, as Julian Hale noted. The domestic transportation network had significant flaws, which only frustrated tourists. This was, however, an issue to which the communist regime did try to attend. Improving the transportation infrastructure was a regular issue on the government’s agenda, and tourism was one of the main reasons for pursuing the modernization of railways and roads. In 1950, 14.9 percent of the total national investment was directed toward transportation; although in 1960, this plummeted to 7.4 percent.⁸³ Despite the proportional decline, the percentage of total state investment actually doubled.⁸⁴ In 1980, transportation’s share of state investment increased even further, reaching 11.2 percent and only slowly declining afterward.⁸⁵ Yet the amount of investment was not reflected in the length or the quality of the railway or road networks. In 1950, Romania had 6,743 miles of railway lines; by 1960, the figure had only increased to 6,823 miles; in 1970, it was 6,842 miles, a mere 19-mile increase in ten years.⁸⁶ Between 1950 and 1960, not a single mile of the line was electrified, although, between 1960 and 1989, one-third of the lines were electrified. Although the length of double-track lines reached 1,831 miles in 1989, this was less than one-third of existing railway tracks.⁸⁷ Traveling by rail in socialist Romania could be a time-consuming experience.

Traveling by car was an alternative, but not necessarily a more desirable, option. Alas, not only did the road network not expand from the 1960s to the late 1980s, it decreased slightly from 47,244 miles to 45,245 miles. On the bright side, the availability of modernized roads doubled during this time, from 5,281 to 10,212 miles.⁸⁸ The Romanian government chose to channel its investments into those parts of the country that were more likely to be visited by foreign tourists: Bucharest, the Black Sea Coast, and the mountain region of Prahova Valley. This was, however, insufficient to cope with the expectations of foreign and Romanian tourists, many of whom wanted to visit the whole country and not just the seaside area or Bucharest and its surroundings.

To compensate for the lack of modernized roads, officials encouraged tourists to travel by train. In the mid-1960s, a program called “traveling by train in circuit” offered both foreign and Romanian tourists the possibility of buying subsidized train tickets for going on vacation. The offer comprised eleven extended routes and six small tours, which covered many regions of the country. The circuits included Bucharest, the Black Sea seaside, or a mountain region. The prices started at 90 lei (about $5 USD) for a second-class ticket and reached 149 lei (about $8) for the first class (the second-class fare was the equivalent of almost 10 percent of an average salary in Romania in the 1960s).⁸⁹ The cost varied according to the length of the circuit. The tickets, which were sold only to individuals, could be purchased at any Romanian railway travel agency located in each town or city, as well as from the main railway stations. An individual could purchase a maximum of six tickets, which were valid for two months. The ticket allowed for layovers during the trip. The program attempted to make vacationing by train both economical and attractive to tourists as it introduced flexible routes and prices, a relative novelty for Romanian socialist tourism.⁹⁰ But such packages were primarily aimed at Romanians and tourists from socialist countries who had limited financial resources. They did not seek to attract the wealthier Western tourists, who had foreign currency to spend.⁹¹ A different option was available for them. In 1981, a special train, Euxinus-80, which only carried foreign tourists, was set up to connect Bucharest and Constanța. Although the train had no stops en route, services were upgraded to meet foreign tourists’ demands.⁹² This was a compromise in order to replace the air trips that required too much combustible fuel, which became too expensive to support. On the other hand, the socialist state expected to earn one million dollars from this special train alone, which had fares set in hard currencies.⁹³

In addition, tourists from Western countries were encouraged to rent a car and tour Romania by themselves or with a guide from the ONT–Carpathians. With prices preset in dollars, this option was by far the most economically beneficial for the socialist state. In 1976, a four-hour tour of Bucharest by car would cost $16.65, and a two-day trip to Poiana Braşov, a mountain resort in the Carpathians, was priced at $136. The same trips could have been taken in a mini-bus or in a coach for less than half those costs: $6.10 for the tour of Bucharest and $37.25 for the two-day excursion to the mountains.⁹⁴ Undoubtedly, the Romanian government aimed at dealing in a capitalist way with capitalist tourists, as these prices were quite high, even for the presumably wealthier Western tourists. Furthermore, as we shall see, the government placed considerable emphasis on the number of services that tourists had at their disposal, from modern motels and inns along the road to the Romanian Automobile Association’s assistance in case of accidents or other unwanted troubles.⁹⁵ Nevertheless, the tourists who hit the road by themselves, or those taking buses, had to deal with the same problem: the lack of modernized roads that restricted their choice of destinations or made the trip a challenge.

One solution to overcoming the lack of modernized roads was to fly tourists to their specific destinations. Already in 1957, a direct flight between Brussels and Bucharest was established by the Belgian air carrier Sabena.⁹⁶ In 1962, five regular flights operated by TAROM flew between Bucharest and Copenhagen, Paris, Vienna, Brussels, and Athens. The number of flights to capitalist countries increased to eight in 1965 (to London, Zurich, and Rome) and ten in 1967 when Cologne and Frankfurt in West Germany were added.⁹⁷ Airline connections with capitalist Western Europe reflected the country’s improved economic and political relations with the capitalist West. This was a general tendency in the Eastern Bloc, but Romania was a frontrunner in this respect. Flights to Cologne and Frankfurt were the direct outcome of Romania’s decision to establish diplomatic relations with West Germany in 1967.⁹⁸

Political openness toward the West was a prerequisite for an extensive airline network but hardly the only one. Throughout the 1960s, the Romanian government invested heavily in acquiring airplanes and building and modernizing airports.⁹⁹ Already in 1963, a note from the Romanian Consulate in Brussels to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bucharest stated that if, until 1960, Belgian tourists preferred to vacation in southern France, Italy, and Spain, their preferences had recently changed and they were seeking new tourist destinations like Romania.¹⁰⁰ Furthermore, the note added that besides its access to the sea and the presence of an attractive natural landscape, Romania had the advantage of being easily reachable as the distance was comparable with that to southern Italy and Spain if traveling by airplane.¹⁰¹ Because in the early 1960s tourists traveled to Romania mostly in organized groups and used charter flights, the state had to pay more attention to this means of transportation. This is why the 1965 plan for the development of international tourism planned to have ten airplanes bought for charter flights and only six or seven for regular flights.¹⁰²

But buying airplanes was not enough to make airline transportation work in Romania. Airports had to be built or refurbished as well. A common practice was transforming former military airports for civilian use.¹⁰³ This was the case with big cities like Bucharest but also with other tourist regions, which were made accessible to tourists with the help of charter flights. Otopeni Airport, a former military airfield during the World War II, was opened to civilian flights in the late 1960s, and in 1969, on the occasion of Richard Nixon’s visit to Romania, a business lounge was created at the airport.¹⁰⁴ Two years later, the existence of a 2.1-mile runaway allowed the Pan American Boeing 707 airplane that flew from New York to Bucharest to land at Otopeni Airport. This was the first transatlantic flight to land in Romania, and it was meant to improve both business and tourist connections between Romania and the United States.¹⁰⁵

Another airport was built at Mihail Kogălniceanu, a village 10 miles from Constanța, the main city on the Romanian Black Sea Coast. The proximity to the Black Sea Coast and the advent of charter flights, which began to reach Romania in the mid-1960s, made it a good place to build an airport. According to Gheorghe Constantin, the first airport commander, construction started in 1960. The authorities chose that location precisely because of its proximity to the seaside; they hoped it would enhance the prospects of developing international tourism.¹⁰⁶ Prior to the building of the airport, the village had been isolated as there was no proper road to link it to Constanța. It was the construction of the airport that propelled the modernization of the area. An asphalt road connected Mihail Kogălniceanu to the national highway that led to Constanța, and a running water system was soon in place. However, as of the mid-1970s, because the airport was projected to operate only during the summer, it had neither heating nor hot water in the passengers’ waiting room.¹⁰⁷ Delayed flights were a regular occurrence, and airport personnel, overwhelmed in the summer months, often misplaced tourists’ luggage.¹⁰⁸

After a promising start in the 1960s and 1970s, the quantity of air traffic to and from international destinations slowly declined in the 1980s because of rising fuel prices, and TAROM, the national airline company, sought to strengthen its influence over foreign airline companies.¹⁰⁹ This created tensions between the Romanian state, some international tourist firms, and national aeronautic agencies in Western Europe. In 1981, French tourist operators made the signing of tourist contracts for that year conditional on the granting of the right of their charter flights to land at Bacău airport (in eastern Romania), where TAROM had a full monopoly.¹¹⁰ The Political Bureau of the CC of PCR and the Romanian Aeronautic Agency agreed to this demand as they estimated that French tourists arriving in this part of the country could bring in some $700,000.¹¹¹

Although the Romanian state modernized transportation infrastructure, this project did not cover the whole country; it prioritized the regions more likely to be visited by foreign tourists. This led to a disparity between tourist destinations, such as Bucharest and its surroundings, the Black Sea Coast, and some Transylvanian cities and the rest of the country. In the long term, this restricted the development of international tourism to those areas rather than to the whole country, as tourist and party officials had initially planned. The change in plans was not a deliberate decision but rather the result of the state’s lack of capital and of tourist agencies, which would only book certain destinations in Romania.

Like socialist Romania, Francoist Spain also understood that having an efficient transportation infrastructure was essential to attracting tourists. It also faced several obstacles, but the ultimate success of tourism and the involvement of charismatic ministers, such as Fraga, forced the development of a transportation network. The first draft of the 1953 National Tourism Plan mentioned that the tourists’ first impression was formed at the frontier and after entering different cities in Spain.¹¹² Therefore, the modernization of both roads and railways should be one of the government’s priorities. But roads were crucial. Almost half of the million tourists who visited Spain in 1951 preferred to travel by car. Wisely, the 1952 draft of the Plan Nacional de Turismo predicted that this type of transportation would offer more opportunities for the future, and therefore it should receive more attention.¹¹³ Although a decree for the modernization of road infrastructure had been issued in December 1950, the results were slow to materialize. The 1952 draft of the Plan Nacional de Turismo emphasized that, first and foremost, the government should modernize the roads, especially those used by foreign tourists. The plan also noted that the airplane was still the preferred means of transportation for well-to-do tourists. In 1952, around 86,000 tourists traveled to Spain by plane.¹¹⁴ Therefore, planners recommended that Iberia, the Spanish national airline, improve service and offer connections to various destinations within Spain and abroad, including the more exotic islands of the Canaries and Baleares.¹¹⁵ These were ambitious goals. But as the Plan Nacional de Turismo would note just one year later, there were notable obstacles.¹¹⁶

Because tourism was not yet a priority for the Spanish government in the early 1950s, the tourist officials who authored the 1953 plan had to first convince the Ministry of Public Works to include the frontier and the tourist areas, especially the coast, in the Plan for Modernization of Roads.¹¹⁷ The plan asked for small improvements, such as traffic signs and a clear separation of the two sides of the road, arguing that these amendments would not cost much and they would make a positive first impression on tourists. In addition, it recommended the creation of parking lots, small recreation places with fresh water, and, last but not least, gas stations near the freeway exit in each town.¹¹⁸ Creating a favorable image was, in fact, a thorny issue, as tourists reaching Spain by car had to wait long hours at the border, a topic that the Plan Nacional de Turismo only briefly listed among its priorities.¹¹⁹

The next item on the plan’s agenda was the modernization of railways. As this was the second most popular means of transportation that foreign tourists used to reach Spain, the plan outlined the long-term changes needed to improve this service. Among others, it recommended buying new carriages and locomotives, setting new routes to popular destinations, such as Madrid–Toledo or Madrid–El Escorial, and the maintenance, modernization, and expansion of railway lines. Because these developments required investment, the plan identified the comfort, punctuality, and cleanliness of trains as immediate priorities, as these were the issues that came up most often in tourists’ complaints.¹²⁰ But recommendations and calls for investment did not yield immediate results.

Nonetheless, from the end of the 1940s to the early 1970s, the transportation infrastructure in Spain significantly improved.¹²¹ The road network increased from 68,560 miles in 1951 to 80,844 miles in 1960 and to 86,619 miles in 1969.¹²² Railway lines also increased from 6,951 miles in 1952 to 11,198 miles in 1960, while the length of electrified lines grew from 1,021 miles in 1952 to 1,765 miles in 1960.¹²³ Nevertheless, the quality of railway vehicles did not improve at the same pace. In 1960, RENFE (the Spanish national railway system) had no diesel locomotives in use; by 1975, it had only 715. In 1960, 2,544 locomotives were still propelled by steam; their numbers only decreased toward the end of the 1960s, dipping to 308 in 1967. With less than 20 percent of the lines electrified and so many steam locomotives still in use, the performance of Spanish trains was poor compared with France and Britain but better than socialist Romania, which did not have a single mile of electrified railway in 1960.¹²⁴

Although substantial, the advancements in road and railway transportation in Spain were not enough to keep up with the rapid changes that characterized the postwar period.¹²⁵ In 1971, the wife of Alfred B. Pittman Jr., an American tourist from Dallas, Texas, complained to Alfredo Sánchez Bella, the minister of information and tourism, about the conditions on the roads. During their trip from Madrid to Málaga, she noticed that the “roads are still terrible, road signs poorly marked and even the maps of Spain are bad. Travel time allowance has to be tripled.”¹²⁶ After they left Málaga for Paris, also by car, they had to overcome the heavy traffic at the border.

“All of France was coming to Spain, and we must have seen 30 wrecks along the highway and bumper-to-bumper traffic.… We were stopped twice by the policemen handling city traffic and highway traffic, and the first ticket we paid (200 pesetas just to quiet down the policemen), but we felt the charge was unfair at the time. The 2^nd incident concerned passing on the highway, and my husband refused the 400 pesetas ticket because we were innocent. When the traffic policemen finally understood that we had no pesetas to give him, he laughed and let us go. Now, do you really think this is the way to operate?”¹²⁷

Most of the first wave of tourists that visited Spain were French motorists. Only toward the end of the 1950s did tourists from Britain and West Germany start to frequent the Spanish beaches.¹²⁸ What made Spain a more accessible tourist destination for them was the introduction of charter flights, which made possible a trip from London to Málaga in just a couple of hours.¹²⁹ Although IATA, the International Commercial Aviation Cartel, did not fully liberalize rules governing charter flights until 1965 (because it wanted to preserve the advantage of traditional carriers), the popularity of this type of flight forced the airline industry to adopt it.¹³⁰ Charter flights opened the door to airline travel for the middle classes in countries such as Great Britain, France, and West Germany and transformed an otherwise elite type of travel into something accessible to the masses. While in 1959, a regular flight from London to Valencia cost around $115, a two-week, all-inclusive chartered package to Mallorca could be as inexpensive as $125.¹³¹ The previously less-connected regions, such as Málaga in southern Spain and the islands, strongly benefited from this type of travel. By 1962, charter flights accounted for 35 percent of all air traffic in Spain, but they reached 60 percent in places such as Mallorca.¹³²

Nevertheless, the rise of charter flights would not have been possible without improvements in the airport infrastructure in Spain. One such example was the modernization of Málaga’s airport. The existing airport was small and unfit for landing bigger planes. This is why most of the tourist flights came through Gibraltar, a British overseas possession, and then by bus to Málaga.¹³³ Spanish officials foresaw the economic benefits that would result from modernizing the airport in Málaga, but they also wanted to strengthen their position in relation to British Gibraltar. The building of a second runway started in 1958. Información y Turismo, a local newspaper published by the Ministry of Tourism, prominently announced the event on its first page.¹³⁴ This idea irked the British as they feared economic decline for Gibraltar. As a concession, in 1959, Spanish authorities decided to eliminate tourist visas for British tourists, except for those coming through Gibraltar.¹³⁵

Tourist Infrastructure and Growth

In socialist Romania and Francoist Spain, the state played different roles in developing and managing tourist infrastructure. There was a difference in how the two regimes envisioned the notion of property. While in Romania most of the tourist infrastructure belonged to the state, in Spain the majority of infrastructure was private; only a small portion (in particular, the paradores nacionales, or national hotels) was under the state’s administration. Yet Spain also had a number of state-financed programs that tried to influence and control the ways in which tourist infrastructure took shape.

Tourist infrastructure meant not only hotels and restaurants but also the building of tourist spaces either as part of a larger city’s infrastructure or, in some cases, as individual tourist towns. In both countries, such matters were the state’s responsibility. Furthermore, both Romania and Spain followed the so-called European model of urban development, which emphasized improvements in the quality of life and urban culture, as opposed to the US model, which tended to build a standardized set of facilities to revitalize shabby industrial cities.¹³⁶ Both the Romanian and Spanish cases involved either the modernization of preexisting infrastructure, such as at the spa resorts, or the building of tourist cities from scratch, especially in seaside areas.

In 1966, the first plan to tackle international tourism in socialist Romania emphasized that a tourist infrastructure should be developed primarily at the seaside but also in the rest of the country. The proposed goal was “to increase the number of tourist objectives, routes, and services at the disposal of foreign tourists in order to expand the tourist receipts per capita.”¹³⁷ To accomplish this, the plan recommended building a large array of accommodations and eating establishments accessible to low- and middle-income tourists, as this was the tendency in countries such as Italy, Austria, Spain, and Yugoslavia.¹³⁸

In socialist Romania, tourist infrastructure was present in three main types of cities: tourist resorts (located either on the Black Sea Coast or in the mountains, especially in the Prahova Valley), spa or health resorts (with a preexisting older infrastructure and located throughout the country), and historic neighborhoods (old city centers) within larger cities (mostly in Transylvania and to a certain extent in cities such as Bucharest, Iaşi, and Constanța). Some of these tourist places became iconic for the development of international tourism in Romania to such an extent that ordinary Romanians regarded them as epitomizing the West.¹³⁹ Mamaia was the most popular destination for international tourists on the Romanian Black Sea Coast, and the Hotel Intercontinental was a landmark of foreign tourism in Bucharest.

In the late 1950s, the socialist state chose Mamaia, an older resort on the Black Sea Coast, conveniently located on the outskirts of Constanța, the largest city in the region, as the first location to develop beach tourism. Besides its proximity to Constanța, the resort was also known as a tourist site during the interwar period; for instance, in 1939 alone, 10,506 tourists visited Mamaia.¹⁴⁰ What made Mamaia especially attractive for tourist development was that it was an isthmus, surrounded on one side by the Black Sea and on the other by a large lagoon.

To the existing interwar infrastructure of about 1,067 beds (one main hotel and a number of villas), a new hotel and a restaurant were added in Mamaia in 1957.¹⁴¹ Between 1959 and 1962, a new highway was built along the length of the isthmus and the seashore. The highway opened the way for the systematization of the resort and the building of new hotels.¹⁴² Most of the hotels were robust buildings, with eight-to-ten floors, which lined the seashore. In the mid-1960s, these hotels reached a total capacity of about 10,000 beds.

The construction of hotels went hand in hand with that of restaurants, commercial complexes, and places for spending free time. The City Theater opened its doors in 1963 along with the nearby “Perla” Commercial Complex. The number of hotels continued to mushroom throughout the 1960s and 1970s; the last hotel, the Mamaia Inn, opened in 1985. In 1968, a billiards room was opened, and from 1971, tourists could spend their nights in Sunquest, one of the city’s first discos. That same year the first swimming pools were built.¹⁴³ In the mid-1970s, a waterskiing trail, other discos, tennis courts, and the Mamaia Vacation Village opened to the public. In less than twenty years, thanks to substantial state investment, Mamaia became an important tourist attraction at the Black Sea for those in search of sun and fun for a moderate price.

The replanning of the interwar era resorts started in the late 1950s when the socialist government designated Mamaia as the top priority for tourism. At first, the state built a number of luxurious hotels that architecturally resembled the tourist constructions of the interwar period, but it soon shifted to building inexpensive and large hotels more suited to the mass tourism of the 1960s. For instance, between 1967 and 1971, out of the planned 11,300 bed places, 8,400 were placed in third-category hotels, 2,600 were in second-category hotels, and only 300 were in first-category hotels.¹⁴⁴ Over the course of about ten years, Mamaia was practically redesigned as a tourist resort: not only were new modern hotels and restaurants built from scratch, but so too was the infrastructure of the whole tourist town. Spaces for shopping and spending the evenings were integrated into the broader network of hotels, turning Mamaia into a self-sufficient tourist town that could provide fun and relaxation, and the opportunity to shop, for both foreign and domestic tourists.

The spa resort was another type of self-sufficient tourist town. These attracted primarily Romanian tourists, as their accommodation facilities were not as modern or numerous as those on the seaside. For example, a 1967 travel guide of Romania praised Eforie Nord (on the Black Sea Coast south of Constanța and Mamaia) for its modern hotels, which had rooms with individual bathrooms and other updated facilities. It also noted that the spa towns of Băile Herculane (located 150 miles from Timișoara in the southwest of the country) and Sovata (in Northern Moldavia) each had only one major hotel at that time.¹⁴⁵ Mamaia and Eforie Nord offered something most spa resorts did not—long seaside beaches.

The number of hotels in a health resort usually ranged from one to six. For example, in 1989, Covasna, a popular health resort in Eastern Transylvania, had six hotels, each with a large capacity, varying from 123 rooms in Hotel Căprioara (the Deer) to 496 rooms in Hotel Montana. Furthermore, each hotel had a restaurant, a conference room, and, most importantly, a cure installation for medical tourists to receive therapeutic treatment.¹⁴⁶ Nonetheless, health resorts were not very economically advantageous for the Romanian treasury. During a meeting of the Political Bureau of the Romanian Communist Party in January 1970, Vasile Patilineț, an old-guard Communist Party member close to Ceaușescu, noted that “it’s good to try to streamline tourism in health resorts, but the proposed measures are not the most effective ones: what the report recommends is an increase in prices by changing the resort’s classification from second to first category instead of taking concrete measures such as the reduction of the personnel, which is too numerous in comparison with needs.”¹⁴⁷ Poor and incoherent management was also blamed for the inadequate results. Mihai Dalea, another participant in the meeting, mentioned the case of a mountain hut where three distinct managements were in charge.¹⁴⁸ The Political Bureau meeting adjourned after agreeing to ask local authorities (both party secretaries and city or village councils) to better comply with their responsibility to report such problems to policymakers in Bucharest.¹⁴⁹

This approach did not bring the expected results; in 1973, the health resorts in Romania were still outside of the international tourism stream. In response, Paul Niculescu-Mizil, a Political Bureau member, called for investing only in two or three well-known health resorts, so that they could become as economically efficient as Mamaia and Eforie Nord on the Black Sea Coast. One of the proposed resorts was Băile Herculane, which had the necessary pedigree because it had been a tourist destination since the eighteenth century. Yet, Niculescu-Mizil’s proposal was met with skepticism as the Political Bureau anticipated other problems. One was that erecting new constructions was the responsibility of the local township (consiliul popular), which had few resources to successfully carry on the task. And most of the time, the allocated funds were not spent because the local authorities reportedly could not find suitable constructors.¹⁵⁰ The conflicting relationship between the central and local authorities, so obvious in the case of health resorts, reflects a key flaw of a centralized system where a central authority may set goals that local authorities cannot meet because they lack the necessary means to fulfill the assigned tasks.¹⁵¹ Although some policymakers had hoped that health spas would attract foreign tourists, that hope came to naught.

Another approach to building tourist infrastructure was the erection of hotels in cities that presented some tourist potential. Hence, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, at least one modern hotel was built in every county’s capital town, using domestic and foreign capital.¹⁵² The 1965–1970 plan for the development of tourism proposed the building of 29 such hotels with 6,700 rooms.¹⁵³ The size of each hotel room was set at 150 square feet and all rooms had to have bathrooms. The differences in the degree of comfort came from the size and ornamentation of common spaces and hallways and from the hotel’s services. A hotel’s degree of comfort also varied according to the city’s importance.¹⁵⁴ Cities such as Timișoara, Cluj, Iași, Oradea, Sibiu, and Pitești benefitted from larger investments—90,000 lei (around $5,000) per hotel room—while smaller urban settlements, such as Bacău, Făgăraș, Galați, Brăila, Hunedoara, Bîrlad, Tîrgu Mureș, Craiova, Ploiești, and Suceava received only 70,000 lei per room (around $3,888).¹⁵⁵ While Suceava is located in northeastern Romania, just a stone’s throw from the medieval monasteries in northern Moldavia, which were important tourist destinations that the Romanian government wanted to promote, Bîrlad, located in central Moldavia, lacked any tourist potential. This discrepancy makes one question the logic behind the distribution of investments.

In addition to the ambitious plan of building hotels in each city, the socialist government wanted to develop a major hotel in Bucharest. A 1966 report about the development of tourism complained that Bucharest’s hotels could not cope with the large number of tourists. For this reason, the ONT–Carpathians sometimes had to remove Bucharest from tourist itineraries, refuse offers, or lodge tourists in student dorms.¹⁵⁶ A solution to this crisis came in 1966 when Tower International Corporation, a subsidiary of Pan American World Airways, made an offer to the Romanian government to finance the building of a modern hotel in Bucharest. Besides resolving a dire accommodation shortage, the proposal allowed the Romanian authorities to strengthen their connections with the West, the United States in particular, and possibly enhance their access to foreign capital.

Following deliberations among officials from the Ministry of External Commerce, the Ministry of Internal Commerce, the State Committee for Planning, the Council of Ministers, and the National Bank of Romania, the Executive Committee of the Romanian Communist Party gave its final approval for the construction of Intercontinental Hotel on February 14, 1967.¹⁵⁷ The Romanian state planned to repay the $6 million loan received from Tower International Corporation from the revenue that the hotel was supposed to bring to the socialist budget.¹⁵⁸ The Romanians expected a $3.5 million income in the first year and $35 million over the next ten years, out of which $10 million were to go to the American partner in order to cover the initial credit plus the 7 percent interest rate.¹⁵⁹ The hotel welcomed its first paying customer on February 27, 1971, while it was officially launched in early May when a group of American tourists and businessmen came with the first Pan Am flight that connected New York to Bucharest.¹⁶⁰ The twenty-three-story building was indeed very modern and architecturally modernist (see figure 3); it had a restaurant on the first floor and air conditioning in all four hundred rooms. The architects who designed the building were Romanian,¹⁶¹ but the technology—such as the Otis elevators and the Samsung air-conditioning—and most of the furniture were imported. The Tower International Corporation also provided a hotel manager, a food manager, and training for Romanian personnel. While some employees were sent abroad, most of the training took place on-site, as Romanian officials deemed it too expensive to transport staff and pay for their training in the United States.¹⁶² The hotel proved to be a successful business for the socialist state, as the investment was recouped in five years and eight months compared to the initial expectation of seventeen years. In the first seven years alone, it brought in of $51 million.¹⁶³ But its success rested upon something in short supply in Romania—capital, especially hard currency capital. Attracting such funds was a primary reason for the Romanian state to develop parts of the country for international tourism. But luring international tourists proved more expensive than originally anticipated, as much of a hotel’s amenities or furniture and food (exotic fruits, seafood) had to be imported. This is why, for Dacia and România, two hotels built in the 1970s, Nicolae Ceaușescu wanted to use only Romanian products.¹⁶⁴ Yet the design had to be modern, and Arhitectura Magazine, the most important publication of the Association of Romanian Architects, published in 1969 articles about the works of the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the German Walter Gropius, two of the best-known proponents of modernist architecture.¹⁶⁵

Despite the regime’s considerable interest in developing tourist infrastructure, specific legislation about the classification of tourist establishments only appeared in the 1970s. The first attempt to classify tourist establishments was an order issued by the Ministry of Tourism in 1973, but they were only firmly classified in 1976.¹⁶⁶ In Romania, there were six types of tourist establishments: hotels, motels, inns, villas, villas with apartments, and lodges (especially common in the spa resorts). The Romanian rating of tourist accommodations did not follow the Western model of rating hotels according to the number of stars. Hotels and villas were divided into four categories: luxury and categories I, II, and III. Motels and inns were classified into three categories (I, II, and III), while villas with apartments were split into luxury, category I, and category II. Starting in 1968, foreign tourists could also be accommodated in student dorms and private houses. This classification system, which survived until 1991, reflected the degree of amenities, such as bathroom facilities (shower or tub), a balcony, furniture, and other amenities. Prices varied accordingly.

As table 1 shows, it was significantly cheaper to vacation in Romania as part of an organized tour, which covered both lodging and meals (full board), rather than as an individual tourist (rooms only). As Romanian society experienced only an inchoate liberalization in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which was nipped in the bud in the 1980s, the most inexpensive housing options (student dorms and private houses) were only available via the ONT–Carpathians. For private individuals to become tourist hosts, they had to register with the ONT–Carpathians and the local militia, which involved a certain degree of coercion.

Despite the state’s effort to exert a considerable degree of social control, tourism continued to grow in socialist Romania, as the increase in the number of tourist establishments shows. From 1970 to 1980, tourist accommodation expanded by 42.3 percent while the total number of beds grew by 62.8 percent.¹⁶⁷ During the same time, the number of hotels and villas increased by 42.3 percent and 17 percent, respectively. The number of bed places in hotels grew at the most impressive pace, by 71.4 percent during the 1970s.¹⁶⁸ Most of the infrastructure was concentrated on the Black Sea Coast, with an accommodation capacity of 200 hotels and 155,000 beds in the 1980s.¹⁶⁹ At the national level, in 1970 Romania had 497 hotels with 284,434 beds, while in 1980, the lodging capacity increased to 707 hotels with 404,432 beds.¹⁷⁰ On the one hand, this dynamic reflected the large amount of money that the Romanian government invested in tourism; on the other, it reflected the preference for building large hotels (as seen from the hotels built in the health resorts).

However, the tourist growth of the 1970s was not sustained in the 1980s. From 1980 to 1985, the number of tourist establishments grew only by 4.4 percent, and the number of bed places expanded by only 1.5 percent.¹⁷¹ But the growth in lodgings was not equally distributed. The number of hotels continued to grow (by 10.9 percent), as did bed places in hotels (by 10.2 percent), but the number of villas decreased by 4.4 percent. In the last half of the 1980s, the number of total tourist establishments decreased for the first time in twenty years. The number of tourist accommodation facilities shrank by 3.5 percent and that of bed places by 14 percent. Only hotels continued to expand, their number showing an increase of 5.9 percent.¹⁷² One explanation for this is the mindset of Romanian tourist planners who were quantifying modernity by the number of newly built hotels. Yet this was an economic decision because such hotels were less expensive to build; sections of them were made of precast concrete and then quickly assembled.

The growth of tourist establishments clearly reflects the Romanian state’s interest in developing tourism along with its willingness to invest substantial funds in this sector. Between 1966 and 1970, 3 billion lei (around $1 billion USD) were allocated to tourism, while the 1970–1975 five-year plan announced a 4 billion lei (around $2 billion) investment in tourism.¹⁷³ However, by the mid-1980s, the amounts invested in tourist infrastructure declined significantly.¹⁷⁴ The general crisis in the Romanian economy was the main reason for this.¹⁷⁵ A number of scholars also argue that this happened because international tourism stopped being a priority for the communist regime as it failed to deliver the expected results and exposed the population to a cosmopolitan influence.¹⁷⁶ The available archival documents lack consistency in regard to this issue. On the one hand, in the early 1980s, the Central Committee attempted to restart the growth of international tourism, especially with Western countries, while on the other hand, the Securitate increased its surveillance of tourist workers and even of foreign tourists.¹⁷⁷

Overall, the planning of tourist infrastructure during the 1960s–1970s did not go beyond the traditional tourist areas, such as the Black Sea Coast, Prahova Valley, and the health resorts. What changed between the interwar period and the 1950s was the impressive amount of investment in tourism and the resulting increase in the number of tourist establishments. However, the way in which tourist establishments were used varied from one place to another as it largely depended on the local authorities’ interest in tourism and the managerial abilities of those in charge. Only the Black Sea Coast and the large hotels in Bucharest proved economically profitable, which limited the regime’s efforts to turn Romania into a successful player in the European or the world tourist market.

Like Romania, Francoist Spain also had to plan and build much of its tourist infrastructure almost from scratch. But the Spanish approach was slightly different. Whereas in the 1940s and the early 1950s the state held tight control over tourism, in the 1960s the private sector became the trailblazer in tourism development. The 1953 National Tourism Plan (Plan Nacional del Turismo) noted that “it is important to attract the collaboration of the private sector, leaving to the state only those actions that private investors cannot perform.”¹⁷⁸ Nevertheless, the state continued to play an important role, including reserving the right to control the prices in hotels and restaurants, a power it retained until the end of Franco’s regime in 1975. As late as 1972, hotel operators were asking the state to increase the prices for rooms by 70 percent in order to attain the revenue levels of 1955.¹⁷⁹

In a nutshell, what characterized the Spanish approach to tourist infrastructure under Franco’s regime was a continuous negotiation between the state and the private sector. Starting in the early 1960s, the state focused on creating the general public infrastructure, including transportation, sanitation, and urban systematization, while encouraging the private sector to build and manage hotels, restaurants, and other local tourist installations and facilities.¹⁸⁰ Toward that end, the state offered some financial assistance primarily in the form of the Hotel Credit Program (Crédito Hotelero, see below) as well as subsidized prices for those entrepreneurs investing in tourist establishments designed to accommodate foreign tourists and for the private businesses building hotels in the mountain regions. Initially not an area of interest for the Spanish authorities, the mountain areas became a priority only in the mid-1960s. The state investments directed to this sector from the mid-1960s exemplify the overwhelming importance of state policies and incentives in shaping, positively or negatively, tourism in Francoist Spain, a political regime that otherwise took pride in its newly adopted capitalist market and practices.

As in the Romanian case, developing a tourist infrastructure involved the modernization of existing settlements, often rural, in the seaside areas and later in the mountains in addition to the building or renovation of hotels in larger cities. The most developed tourist area remained Madrid, but the most popular beach destination was the shoreline of Costa Brava. Located in northeastern Spain, Costa Brava is a stretch of 160 kilometers of Catalonian coastline along the Mediterranean Sea. Tourism began to be of interest starting in the interwar period, but the civil war ended this. Into the 1950s, textiles and fishing remained the region’s most important industries.¹⁸¹ This situation changed in the 1950s when Costa Brava became very appealing to foreign tourists, especially the French, many of whom would drive there, and the British, in search of sun and inexpensive vacations.

Seemingly overnight, fishing settlements like Sant Feliu, Portbou, Lloret, and Calella de la Costa turned into coveted tourist resorts.¹⁸² In Calella de la Costa, 2,000 bed places were added in just one year. In 1964, Costa Brava had 198 large hotels spread out over nine resorts. The average tourist population that these resorts could sustain in the mid-1960s was about 150,000 tourists a month, but it was common to have more than 600,000 people visiting the area during the peak of the season, from mid-July until the end of August.¹⁸³ But Costa Brava did not develop evenly, particularly because the state failed to make its presence felt. An important division in regard to the available types of accommodation was visible between the northern and the southern sections of the province. In the south, tourists were able to lodge in hotels, whereas in the north, the hotel infrastructure was less dense, and tourists primarily found lodging in private houses.¹⁸⁴ In fact, in the 1960s only half of tourists to the region actually stayed in hotels; the rest chose camping and tourist apartments (see table 2).¹⁸⁵ This marked a significant difference in relation to socialist Romania, where foreign tourists predominantly lodged in hotels built with state funds. The difference reflected, in part, the distinct approaches of the two regimes to the interactions between foreign tourists and local populations. While the socialist regime in Romania sought to control these interactions, tourist officials in Spain wanted to welcome as many tourists as possible and paid little attention to the issue of “security” at this level, although, as we shall see, there were powerful constituencies that voiced concerns about the risks of fraternization with tourists.¹⁸⁶

Besides reflecting two different approaches to tourist infrastructure, the predominance of accommodation in private houses in Costa Brava speaks to the different roles of the state in postwar socialist Romania and Francoist Spain. While in the Romanian case the state’s ability to control and allocate all of the necessary resources enhanced the rapid development of tourist infrastructure, in Spain the state set the framework for the creation of this infrastructure but was not in charge of building it. What is more, the Spanish state often lacked the necessary means to control the implementation of central policies. Thus, the task of erecting new and modern hotels was left to private developers. In the early years, this was one of the shortcomings of the inchoate Spanish tourism policy. The private sector had its own priorities and did not always want to devote its limited capital to supporting the growth of tourist infrastructure. Only the revival of the Hotel Credit Program under Manuel Fraga’s ministerial mandate in the early 1960s provided for more investments in lodging infrastructure. Nevertheless, this did not significantly improve the overall aspect of tourist towns, especially sanitation.

The Spanish state did, however, construct some hotels (paradores) that were supposed to work as models for the private ones, but these only amounted to 10 percent of Spain’s tourist infrastructure. One such example is the Hotel Compostela in Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, a province in northwestern Spain, one of the first paradores.¹⁸⁷

A former medieval hospital, the building was turned into a luxury hotel in 1954 as part of the regime’s attempts to revive the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage.¹⁸⁸ The remodeling of the building took place in haste because of the officials’ plans to inaugurate the new tourist establishment on religious holiday of Santiago el Mayor, the feast day of St. James.¹⁸⁹ The hotel had 175 rooms: 29 with single beds, 6 with double beds with a “matrimonial bed,” and 140 with twin beds. In addition, the hotel included two shared dormitories, with a capacity of 32 and 48 beds, respectively, located on the third and fourth floors; the building did not have an elevator. Only fifty rooms had individual bathrooms, while the rest shared a total of four bathrooms.¹⁹⁰ However, even the tourists staying in the rooms with bathrooms did not enjoy permanent access to running water. Given that just a quarter of the rooms had individual bathrooms, which were only occasionally functional, the conditions could hardly be described as luxurious. What is more, the hotel was not designed for family tourism, given that only six rooms had matrimonial beds; rather, it was designed for groups or individual travelers. Because the city is a pilgrimage site, the hotel met some, but not all, people’s needs. The newly opened tourist establishment mirrored the transition from a religious pilgrimage to commercial tourism, as the place was physically designed to accommodate both pilgrims and tourists who only sought cultural enhancement. The hotel did not undergo any significant changes until 1993, when it was reclassified as a hostel.¹⁹¹

The Spanish tourist planners themselves pinpointed the flaws of developing paradores. The 1955 commission that revised the 1953 law for paradores and hostels noted “the absolute necessity to equip the new tourist establishments belonging to the State with new amenities and provide reparations, so that these establishments are independent units.”¹⁹² Another problem was changing the capacity of these tourist establishments, as the 1953 law only required them to consist of eight rooms, four double and four single. As the number of tourists grew, this approach was deemed unacceptable, and an upgrade to twenty rooms was required. In addition, the rampant inflation of the mid-1950s rendered the funds allocated in 1953 insufficient. These difficulties threatened to halt the state’s initial program of hotel construction.¹⁹³ As of the mid-1950s, because the state lacked the capital to build a reliable tourist accommodation network, it turned its attention to the private sector, choosing to retain only a supervisory role.

Clear regulations regarding the classification of tourist establishments in Spain only came about in 1957. This happened partly because of the expansion of tourist accommodations that tried to cope with the increase in the number of tourists, but also because these establishments did not always provide the services they were supposed to provide according to state-mandated prices or their category.¹⁹⁴ To address such problems, an order of the Council of Ministers from June 14, 1957, classified tourist establishments according to their facilities.¹⁹⁵ The order identified hotels, inns, guesthouses, hotels in spas, and private houses as the accepted types of accommodation. Hotels could be in one of three categories: luxury, A type, and B type, which were then subdivided into first, second, and third classes. Inns were classified into four groups. The hotels included in the luxury category were supposed to have bathroom facilities in each room and access to hot water; those in A category needed to have bathrooms in two-thirds of the rooms, while for those hotels in the first class B category, at least 15 percent of the rooms were required to have a bathroom.¹⁹⁶ To qualify as a hotel, the minimum requirement was at least one bathroom with hot running water in the establishment and one telephone on each floor. Such mandated amenities were sparse and hardly qualified as inducements for international tourists.

Further regulations in 1962 and 1968 did not change the classification of hotels but added new provisions concerning maximum prices and also updated the basic conditions for establishment each category.¹⁹⁷ The decree of September 7, 1962, set up new maximum prices in order to ensure that they did not exceed the rates in other tourist destinations in the Mediterranean region (such as Portugal, Greece, and Yugoslavia). This pricing method serves as a reminder that Spanish tourism officials often defined their policies in relation to those of their Mediterranean competitors. To meet foreign tourists’ increased expectations and to adjust to the emerging realities of Spanish tourism, the decree of July 19, 1968, set up new criteria for each category. It used three principles to differentiate between various tourist establishments: their overall capacity and number of rooms, the services and facilities offered, and the attention paid to the client.¹⁹⁸ Besides the existing five categories for hotels and three for inns and guesthouses, the decree added a classification for tourist apartments, although, in fact, they had already started to function in the early 1960s. In addition, it introduced a higher degree of flexibility in classifying each type of tourist accommodation, employing specific criteria for special locations, such as in the mountain regions, at the beach, in the regional spas, and for motels.¹⁹⁹ Acknowledging that conditions in a popular beach region could be different than in a mountain or spa resort enabled tourist officials and hotel owners to adjust prices and ultimately to better meet tourists’ expectations.

The number of tourist establishments was on the rise from the early 1950s to 1965. In 1952, there were 1,324 hotels in all of Spain.²⁰⁰ But the increase was insufficient to cope with the number of tourists that visited Spain that year. Thus, the hotel infrastructure in Spain was short of 26,000 places compared with the capacity needed to accommodate all tourists.²⁰¹ As the number of tourists increased, the deficit persisted, despite the increase in the number of hotels. For instance, in 1952 and 1953, 98 more hotels were opened as compared with only 170 between 1945 and 1951. In 1960, there were 150,821 bed places in 2,551 hotels, most of them on the Mediterranean Coast.²⁰² Despite showing an annual increase of 8 percent, the hotels were still unable to accommodate all tourists, whose numbers grew by 16.4 percent annually.²⁰³ The tourist boom accelerated the construction of new hotels, and in 1967 the number of beds reached 384,000.²⁰⁴

The expansion of hotels resulted from the Hotel Credit Program (Crédito Hotelero), which, although initiated in 1942, only produced results in the early 1960s. In January 1964, Noticiario Turistico, a magazine published by the Office for Tourist Promotion, touted the intention of the Spanish state to allocate 50 million pesetas for the program.²⁰⁵ At the beginning of each year, the Ministry of Information and Tourism would decide on a certain amount to be allocated for the modernization, renovation, or construction of hotels. Projects were selected on a competitive basis after the submission of an application. In the early 1960s, the Ministry of Information and Tourism supported about two hundred such projects annually.²⁰⁶ Until 1965, the annual increase in accommodation capacity persisted, but after that year, the construction of hotels stalled; the construction of tourist accommodations only continued its rapid growth again in 1970. Compared to the 1950s, in the 1960s–1970s, the tendency was to build fewer but more expensive tourist establishments. In 1963, only 78 hotels were included in the luxury category, while guesthouses (the official statistics counted 1,562 in the second category) predominated.²⁰⁷

From the 1950s to the 1970s, both Spain and Romania built their new tourist infrastructure from scratch. Overall, Spain had a larger accommodation capacity than Romania, but the latter built faster. While in 1967 Spain had 384,000 beds, Romania had only 40,000.²⁰⁸ But the accommodation capacity soared in both countries: in Spain, the number of beds increased to 657,700 in 1972 and then to 804,000 in 1977, while in Romania, lodging capacity reached 99,100 beds in 1972 and 124,400 in 1977. Despite the higher numbers in Spain, the increase in accommodation capacity in Romania (19 percent) was greater than in Spain (12 percent).²⁰⁹ Yet, the type of hotels the two countries built were notably different. Unlike the Romanian case, where large hotels prevailed, in Francoist Spain, medium and small tourist accommodations were more common. At first sight, these establishments’ intimacy might have attracted more tourists than did Romania’s large and modern but impersonal hotels. But this was hardly the main reason why Spanish tourism entrepreneurs favored smaller tourist units. When it came to the size of hotels, capital was the decisive factor. Small- and medium-size hotels required less money, and this was what hotel owners could afford to build.²¹⁰ The Spanish state recognized this limit; in the 1960s, the Hotel Credit Program would support tourist establishments with as few as 30 rooms.²¹¹

Plans for Modernization

Although Spain welcomed more tourists and gained more revenue from tourism than Romania did, both countries underwent a modernization process when they began to develop international tourism. Establishing an efficient transportation network and constructing a tourist infrastructure, sometimes from scratch, were both part of this process of modernization. The state attended to the reconstruction and improvement of the transportation network in both countries. Yet Romania and Spain had different mechanisms in place for the distribution of resources. In Romania, centralized planning provided a coherent development of both transportation and tourism, although it tended to confine the modernization of the transportation network to select tourist areas. But in Spain in the 1950s, the Ministry of Tourism had to convince the Ministry of Public Works to include in its Plan of Modernization the improvement of roads in the frontier and coastal regions; from the government’s point of view, these roads were peripheral compared to roads in central cities. Until early 1960, the Francoist government acknowledged the importance of tourism for financial reasons but only partially embraced it. It took a politician like Manuel Fraga to force increasing state investments in highways or airports.

Because of the different roles that the state played in the development of tourist infrastructure, the two governments had divergent approaches to hotel construction. While in Romania the state managed most tourist establishments, in Spain the state limited its involvement to controlling prices and supporting hotel construction through the Hotel Credit Program. However, this approach did not play out in favor of tourism. The insufficient number of hotels was the major economic obstacle to the growth of Spanish tourism; in 1964 alone, this led to an estimated deficit of $50 million USD. Furthermore, the building of tourist establishments took place in a disorganized way, which put at risks the financial health and other aspects of tourist towns. The situation was so precarious that, in 1973, the Spanish central government debated limiting local authorities’ rights to issue building permits in tourist areas. However, this did not substantially affect the number of visitors. At the same time, the Romanian state invested heavily in tourist infrastructure in the 1960s and 1970s but then sharply reduced the investment rate in the 1980s. The lack of modernized tourist facilities, high prices, and sometimes inadequate services (such as excessive bureaucracy that led to delays) halted tourism development.

But for both Romania and Spain, the 1960s was a decade of growth. The two underwent similar processes when it came to tourist arrivals and building a tourist industry. In the span of a decade, Romania and Spain turned into desirable tourist destinations and pursued policies to build their tourist industries as well as the transportation infrastructure needed to develop international tourism. Despite their locations in different European peripheries and their different political regimes, both countries came to regard international tourism as a source of economic growth and societal change. One short explanation for their choice is that despite their dictatorial regimes, Romania and Spain wanted to pursue economic modernization, and international tourism promised to deliver the revenue needed for this process. But the phenomenon was more complex. In fact, Romania and Spain were not just in tune with each other but also with more economically developed countries in Europe trying to lure foreign tourists. The process of mass tourism in the 1960s turned countries like France and Italy into holiday destinations for wealthier American tourists while their own citizens looked for more affordable tourist destinations in Southern and Eastern Europe. This led to a redistribution of wealth and brough cultural uniformity of tourist services and standards throughout Europe.