Greetings from Spain la tarjeta postal como documento turístico de la modernidad española de los años 60

Abstract

If there is a product that defines the tourist, that was the postcard (which is also a tourist surname). The postcards present the main elements of destinations, cities, their landscapes, in short, what to see and from what point of view. The motifs coincide with other tourist advertisements, but they go much further than a poster or a photograph. At the end of the 19th century, postcards began to have illustrations on one of their faces as an aesthetic ornament (something that two decades later would become the very essence of the postcard). The picture postcard was a cultural and communication phenomenon fruit of the progress of photogravure at the beginning of the 20th century. In the twentieth century, the mass consumption of images began and the postcard proved to be the tourist product par excellence, a summary of the world that defines us what we have to see, the scenography of happiness.
Postcards will play an important role in this novelty. In fact, the postcard followed the tradition of commercial editions of stereoscopic photographs of the previous century, dealing, initially, with the same themes: landscapes, monuments, social events, etc. What was the image of Spanish modernity shown during the 60s through tourist postcards? Spain took as reference, on the one hand, the Italian and French modernity of Mediterranean glamor and, on the other hand, the modernity of a modern country par excellence such as the United States. Tourist postcards were, during those years, an essential and modern medium of great diffusion.

Keywords:

Postal, turismo, cultura visual, modernidad española, arquitectura turística