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Antonio Aledo <antonio.aledo@ua.es> is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Alicante (Spain). With Ph.D. in sociology and a master degree in anthropology, he studies relationships among tourism, urbanism, and the environment. He has conducted fieldwork in Brazil and Central America on the development of residential tourism generated by international demand.

The Spanish region commercially branded as Costa Blanca has long been a popular destination for millions of holidaymakers from both northern Europe and Spain itself (Gaviria Labarta, 1974; Moreno Garrido, 2007). However, from the 1960s onward, these Mediterranean shores have also attracted thousands of people from northern Europe for other purposes, some as more or less permanent residents, and others as seasonal peripatetic visitors, traveling back and forth between their first, second or third homes (Aledo, 2008). In many ways, the increase in second home visits and long-term stays in areas such as Mediterranean Spain parallels well-known developments of seasonal and full-time retirement and other migration in North America to what has been termed the Sunbelt states (Mings & McHugh, 1995). The situation in Europe, however, is more complex, due, for instance, to the crossing of national borders, a variety of spoken languages, and possibly also for greater cultural differences. Certain parts of such flows are related to perceptions of diminishing distances and to the progress of internationalization processes in societies in general, where tourism and other long-distance mobilities are not only an outcome, but also a crucial catalyst.

Yet, this is not a book on the tourism industry; nor is it on the changes induced by it, or on how it has been analyzed by social science disciplines, but on the social nature of tourism. Together, all the case studies reflect an effort to understand global and mobile dynamics and the production of collective memories and cultural identities in the Mediterranean region through ethnographic examples from different areas (such as Andalusia, Crete, Istria, Costa Blanca, Marseille, Mallorca, Lesvos, and Marrakech). However, this context of global mobilities cannot be understood apart from the constant presence of tourists in the Mediterranean coasts. Tourism has been the driving agent of the essence and orientalizing images of most of Mediterranean territories during the last 100 years (Tzanelli, 2003). Labor immigrants, tourists, and new residents from various nationalities and with different personal motivations converge and share with locals the same locations, and create new places that mushroom all over the territories, be it urbanizations, private beaches, or even detention hotels. Besides, the increasing voting relevance of these new social categories through their participation in local and regional elections is adding value to their role as social agents in the political sphere (Chueca Sancho & Aguelo Navarro, 2009; Janoschka, 2010). The practices and the meanings that give sense to daily life (culture) seem to blur traditional dichotomous notions such as leisure/labor, locals/residents, and nationals/foreigners.