The White Lotus comes to Herne Bay
Reflections on tourism, Porto and the Great Iberian Blackout of 2025
We’ve been watching the latest series of White Lotus and speculating where might be the destination of the next one now that they’ve done Hawaii, Sicily and Thailand. My eldest daughter likes to joke that they should do Herne Bay next, or Ramsgate1. I want to see entitled rich Americans unleashed on the East Kent riviera demanding facials and high water pressure.
More likely, however, it will be set somewhere like Porto which in the last 15 years has transformed itself from a seedy down-at-heel mercantile city into one of the world’s premier tourist attractions with one of the most Instagrammed views in the world. The obvious hotel to set the series would be The Yeatman which sits at Vila Nova de Gaia and offers unsurpassed places to take That Photo of Porto’s bridges from its infinity pool.
I was staying there this week as a guest of Taylor’s Port which sponsors the Intoxicating History podcast. I rather confused Instagrammers by actually swimming in the pool rather than pouting winningly. I’ve visited a few times but this time was unusual as it was during the Great Iberian Blackout of Monday 28th April.
It was unsettling being in a five star hotel which has its own generators while the rest of the city was without power. We sat sipping white port and tonics, and eating fine cheese on the terrace while Porto sat in darkness. My worry was that as the sun went down fully, the rest of the city would look across at the Yeatman and see the lights on and come banging on the gates demanding hot food, cold drinks and wifi like something out of a J.G. Ballard novel. Thankfully, at dusk the lights began to come on around the city to much cheers and rejoicing from across the water.
The next day the whole thing seemed like a strange dream. Life went on as if nothing had happened but it was a chilling insight into the fragile nature of civilization and the unreal world of luxury hotels.
When Adrian Bridge, Taylor’s CEO, opened the Yeatman in 2010, many thought he was mad to open such a lavish hotel in what was still a scruffy, neglected city. According to Anthony Symington, from one of the great port families, parts of downtown Porto was a no go area after dark in the 1990s because of drug addicts and prostitutes. Rather like Naples today. They had so few visitors at Graham’s when he was growing up that the children would play hide and seek among the casks in the warehouse.
Cheap flights from Britain and elsewhere have changed all that. I’ve been visiting since 2014 and in that time tourism has increased exponentially. One of the problems Porto has is that the city is tiny and beyond eating and drinking, there’s not actually that much to do. Hence why Bridge has opened the World of Wine complex at Vila Nova de Gaia consisting of various shops, restaurants and museums. The best thing there is that the Bridge Collection of drinking vessels dating back to prehistory is like the British Museum in miniature.
There’s talk of the Douro valley, two hours by train from the city, being the new Tuscany though because it’s a Unesco world heritage site, like Porto, it is impossible to build anything. Being in the Douro at night is an eerie experience as there’s so little light. Outside of towns like Pinhao, very few people live there. According to Bridge, many farmers are looking to sell up because the price of grapes isn’t what it once was. The bottom end has fallen out of the port market, though premium wines are holding up, he insists. While there are fewer jobs in wine, tourism could potentially bring life, schools, and infrastructure to the Douro Valley.
There’s lessons to be learned, however, from other regions that depend on tourism. At the moment there are protests all over Spain because of the impact of too many visitors, particularly in Barcelona. I first visited the city in 1996 and stayed for six months, trying and mainly failing to learn Spanish. It had apparently been spruced up for the Olympics in 1992 but was still strikingly seedy especially in the Ciutat Vella. Almost nobody went to the beaches which were hidden behind decaying warehouses and covered in litter.
The city had been transformed when I stayed for a few days in 2007 with clean beaches and El Born had become a chic area full of bars and boutiques. Now apparently the city has changed again beyond recognition from those days but other than a very brief visit in 2019 I haven’t been back and explored properly. It sounds like 2007 was probably the best time.
There’s definitely a sweet spot for tourism, I remember Portugal in the 1980s when it was all tuk tuks, donkeys and shanty towns on the journey from Faro airport. Who would want to go back to that from the prosperous orderly country of yesterday?
My home town of Faversham is remarkably pretty and has a rich history but it’s rather scruffy and could probably do with some tourist dollars like neighbouring Whitstable. And I’m sure that many in Herne Bay would welcome a White Lotus-style resort, if they could get planning permission. That said, the danger is that it becomes like the Cotswolds or posh Norfolk, full of hollowed-out tourist trap towns that are too expensive for anyone except the wealthy.
Porto, though small for a city, is hopefully big enough to avoid this fate. Wine, and other industries like shoes, mean that it’s not wholly reliant on tourism which can be fickle. A few more blackouts and suddenly Iberia might not seem like such a good destination for rich Chinese and Americans. I remember visiting Beirut in 2016 and staying at Phoenicia Hotel - another potential White Lotus destination - and thinking, why doesn’t everyone visit Lebanon? Then came Covid, economic collapse, a massive explosion and the war between everyone’s favourite Shiite militia Hezbollah and Israel. Not that Portugal is going to start a war with Spain, though nobody thought that America would threaten Canada but such are the times in which we live.
Kent seaside towns that have been mildly gentrified but still with an old fashioned ‘bucket and spade’ feel.
I know what you mean about changes in both Barcelona and Porto. Porto is the nearest non-Galician city to us so we visit once or twice a year. But I first went in 1986 and hated it. It wasn't just dirty and rundown but also had huge income disparity the made the poverty even worse. Today it's hard to believe it's the same city.
We lived near Montpellier 1994 to 2016 and visited Barcelona several times a year. In the early days you could park on the street outside your 5000 peseta (about €20) hotel in the Eixample. The Born had a serious lack of street lights which gave it an extraordinarily gothic look at night-time.
From about 2000 Barna was already beginning to change and we started alternating our visits with Girona or the Costa Brava which was suddenly much nicer (BTW, have you ever been to Villa Mas in St Feliu de Guixols ?) Now I only go back to Barcelona for business and don't linger. I'm glad I got to have experienced it while it still had rough edges but it no longer represents a pleasure to me. Porto is better but for how long?
Correct, 2007 was Barcelona's zenith and I'm totally not just saying that as it was my first time in the city, with the Born as my first night out. All purely anecdotal.