Mankind never went for a swim: When the beach was discovered

And this summer most of us will spend it on a beach, equipped with the essentials to enjoy the sun and the sea.

As humanity has always done during the summer months. Or so we think at least!

Because things were once completely different. Essentially, from ancient times Until the 18th century, the beach was a place that caused fear and anxiety in the collective fantasy.

The coastal landscape was the least intertwined with the dangers of the wilderness. Besides, you only encountered shipwrecks and remnants of natural disasters. The classic mythology is full of such scary stories with the rage of the Ocean. And floods that engulfed the whole world.

The beach was negatively charged as a source of misery. We know this from Homer. Scylla and Charybdis lived on the shores of the Bosphorus, instilling terror in the sailors who made them cross the straits.

But how did it come from a place of torment and destruction to become the absolute synonym of summer carefreeness?

As Alain Corbin, a professor of history at the Sorbonne and author of The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750-1840, explains: "With few exceptions, the classical period knew nothing of the beauties. of the beaches, the feeling of the swimmer sinking in the waves or the pleasures of remaining in the sand ".

And it was not only mythical monsters, such as Leviathan or Kraken, that sowed terror, but also the real dangers lurking on the shores. And what to pioneer here, from pirates and robbers, crusaders and colonialists to diseases like Black Death and smallpox.

In other words, it is not surprising that Dante placed the third circle of Hades on the beach. Throughout western literature the beach functioned as a boundary, it was the symbolic border after which the unknown began.

So why go to a place that looked anything but attractive? And yet, the beach was gradually transformed from something dangerous to something desirable…

The modern view of the beach as a place of recreation and relaxation was born with the rise of urban, industrial society. It was indeed a European discovery, which today serves as a reminder of how ideas about nature have changed over time.

So there in the middle of the 18th century, according to Corbin, the European elite began to look for new qualities. Fresh air, exercise and bath in sea he was looking now, as the Industrial Revolution created a new and suffocating condition within cities.

Especially in England, the homeland of the Industrial Revolution, where rapid change violently transformed society, aristocrats began to worry greatly about their health and the hygiene of cities.

At a time when the armies of the workers now working in the factories were becoming more durable and strong by manual labor, the nobles of the upper classes seemed fragile and weak in front of them. At least they believed this and began to look for ways to compensate for the lack of physical superiority.

And so "rehabilitation by sea" was born. Which was prescribed by her doctors Britain to the aristocrats to regain their lost Rome. Diving in the cold water was not only refreshing, but the necessary step to become robust and flourishing.

The first spas of England appear magically in a few years. And we say "spas" and not resorts because precisely the contact with the sea was considered to have healing properties.

The noble swimmer was not looking for the natural lures of water, but a cure for an ever-increasing number of ailments: from rickets, arthritis, tuberculosis, leprosy, infertility and infections to melancholy and hysteria, everything was now cured by salt water.

It was a virgin version of her culture of wellness that we find today everywhere in the world. Corbin also points out that this generally prevailed as a logic in society, giving examples from the arts and letters of the time.

The once terrific and dangerous coastal landscape has now been transformed (at the turn of the 19th century) into a place that offers life experiences. Life-changing experiences, to be exact.

It is no coincidence that painting has now turned to the sea and the beach. The term "seascape" actually appears around 1804.

Tracing this dramatic change in the consciousness of the world, Corbin concludes that from 1840 onwards the beach began to mean something different to the European. Who now longed to escape for a while from the city and the difficulties of everyday life and found refuge in what until recently only the rich could enjoy.

This change of morals was now facilitated by the development of the railways, but also by the very birth of tourism as a commercial entity. Middle-class families could now go to the beach in ever-increasing numbers.

The beach in this new context meant not only health but also enjoyment. Even the term "holidays" changed. While until then it simply meant being away from work, in the new circumstances it now reflected a desire, the desire for a pleasant break from everyday life.

"Whether we like it or not, the British have given modern tourism to the world," writes academic historian John Walton in his treatise The British Seaside: Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century.

Like "industry and factories, steam, modern transport and other innovations of the Industrial Revolution", the resort was also a British contribution to the world.

The professor traces the expansion of beach resorts from the east coast of England to Normandy first and southwest France then, before the phenomenon generalizes to Europe passing through Italy, parts of Scandinavia and northern Germany.

And the transformative force has been the right vortex here: in the Baltic, the Adriatic and later in Mediterranean and the Atlantic finally, the arrival of the masses of the 19th century changed everything magically. The old cities were upgraded and new ones were built to accommodate all these armies longing for sea and vacation.

And some have seen the truth negatively, believing that capitalism was ruining everything in its path. Like the Jane Austen in her latest and unfinished novel "Sanditon", which satirizes the end of a traditional community of fishermen to give birth to a fashionable coastal town in its place.

"It happened in phases," says John Gillis, a history professor at Rutgers University and author of The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History. "The beach has become a source of food and a place where travel begins and ends in a place of entertainment." and leisure ”.

The 19th century European was now looking for pristine beaches without crowds at the end of his colonial empire. It is at this time (end of the century) that the coastal areas multiply exponentially resorts on the coasts of North and South America, a tourist model that continued throughout the 20th century.

The beach is now well established in the imagination of the European as an escape, an escape from everything and everyone. "Nothing is more epic than the sea," the thinker Walter Benjamin remarked in 1930.

Today, according to the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), half the world's population lives within 60 miles [30 km] of the sea. Coastal populations have increased by 30% in the last XNUMX years and the numbers are expected to increase even more in the decade we are going through.

Beach plots are, after all, among the most expensive in the world, as everyone wants a house or a cottage by the sea.

In the charms and planets now sea, far away from its historical self as something unknown, vast and scary…

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