Spas and Seaside Resorts

Proximity to water—both springs and bodies of water such as lakes and streams, as well as the littoral—was a driving force behind the emergence of a broad range of resort destinations, of varying sizes, serving diverse markets. The health-giving properties attributed to water made the spa’s pedigree considerably older than that of the coastal resort, whose modern European incarnations emerged in Britain and on the continent in the eighteenth century. Thereafter the geography of the resort expanded, and its development was bound up with the growth of mass leisure, the emergence of new transport technologies and channels of distributing tourism products, and other dimensions of the sector’s growth, which implicated labor and leisure together. Resorts and spas were not merely sites of leisure and therapy, but also arenas in which status and sociability were performed. Throughout their history, promotional strategies were marked by efforts to harness a broad textual field to define places in a crowded and competitive destination marketplace, especially as the transnational character of the resort model tended in some respects toward the convergence of the identity of many places.