A2 · Elementary
12 min
travelhistoryconflict and recoveryculture
The Country That Was Always Beautiful: Iran and Tourism After War
El País que Siempre Fue Hermoso: Irán y el Turismo Después de la Guerra
The war in Iran has officially been declared over, and the world is asking: what happens to travelers now? Fletcher and Octavio dig into Iran as a tourist destination, what it means to visit a country the world just bombed, and why some places survive history better than others.
La guerra en Irán ha terminado oficialmente, y el mundo pregunta: ¿qué pasa con los viajeros? Fletcher y Octavio hablan sobre Irán como destino turístico, sobre qué significa viajar a un país que el mundo acaba de bombardear, y sobre por qué algunos lugares sobreviven la historia mejor que otros.
5 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| mochilero | backpacker | El mochilero viaja con poco dinero. |
| viajero | traveler | El viajero llega a un país nuevo. |
| antiguo | ancient / old | Persépolis es muy antiguo. |
| amable | kind / friendly | La gente en Irán es muy amable. |
| efectivo | cash | En ese país, necesitas dinero en efectivo. |
Before I became a foreign correspondent, before any of that, I was just a twenty-three-year-old with a backpack and a Lonely Planet guide, and the first place that genuinely stopped me cold, made me feel like I had no reference point for what I was looking at, was not Paris, was not Rome.
It was Isfahan.
Irán es muy bonito.
Iran is very beautiful.
La gente no sabe esto.
People don't know this.
No, they really don't.
And this week, of all weeks, the topic feels urgent.
Trump told Congress the war is terminated.
The Gerald Ford carrier group has left the region.
Iran sent a ceasefire proposal through Pakistani mediators.
Which means, at some point, people are going to want to go back.
Volver, sí.
Return, yes.
Pero primero, hay que ir.
But first, you have to go.
Es difícil.
It's difficult.
Right, and that's what I want to get into, because Iran before all of this, before the sanctions tightened, before the war, was one of the genuinely surprising travel destinations on the planet.
Not surprising in the sense of, oh how pleasant.
Surprising in the sense of, wait, why has nobody told me about this.
La gente es muy amable.
The people are very kind.
Los turistas dicen esto siempre.
Tourists always say this.
Always.
Every single person I have ever spoken to who traveled to Iran before things closed off said the same thing: the hospitality was almost disorienting.
You'd be invited into strangers' homes within an hour of arriving somewhere.
En España también.
In Spain too.
La gente invita mucho.
People invite a lot.
Es normal.
It's normal.
Fair enough.
But let me push back a little, because the Iranian version of this has a name, ta'arof, a whole elaborate social code around hospitality and politeness.
It's not just being friendly.
It's almost a formal system.
You offer, the guest refuses, you insist, they relent.
It's a dance.
Hay países con reglas especiales para los visitantes.
There are countries with special rules for visitors.
Es muy interesante.
It's very interesting.
And what gets lost in the news coverage of a war, which is inevitably about missiles and casualties and political calculations, is that you're also talking about Persepolis.
Yazd.
The bazaars of Tabriz, which are a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Shiraz, where you can stand in front of Hafez's tomb and watch Iranians of every generation come to read poetry aloud.
Persépolis tiene más de dos mil años.
Persepolis is more than two thousand years old.
Es muy, muy antiguo.
It's very, very ancient.
Twenty-five hundred years, give or take.
Alexander the Great burned it down in 330 BCE, and even the ruins are staggering.
There's a frieze there, the Apadana staircase relief, where you can see delegations from every corner of the ancient world bringing tribute to Darius.
Twenty-three nations, all carved in stone.
It's like a photograph of the ancient world.
Y los turistas pueden caminar allí.
And tourists can walk there.
Pueden tocar la historia.
They can touch history.
Could.
The question now is whether they can again, and when, and what that process looks like.
Because here's what history actually shows us: tourism doesn't come back to post-conflict countries quickly or evenly.
It comes back in waves.
And the first wave is almost never families on holiday.
Los periodistas van primero.
Journalists go first.
Después, los mochileros.
Then, backpackers.
Exactly right.
And I've been in that first wave more than once.
Sarajevo in the late nineties.
Colombo after the Tamil Tiger war ended in 2009.
There's a particular kind of traveler who shows up in the immediate aftermath of a conflict, part journalist, part adventurer, part something harder to name.
And the local economy, which has been destroyed, is almost desperate for them.
El turismo es dinero.
Tourism is money.
Para Irán, es muy importante ahora.
For Iran, it's very important now.
Critical.
Iran had about nine million international visitors a year before the sanctions regime really tightened around 2018.
That number collapsed.
By the time the war started, it was essentially near zero for Western tourists.
The infrastructure, the hotels, the guides, the whole ecosystem withered.
Los guías turísticos no tienen trabajo.
Tour guides have no work.
Es muy triste.
It's very sad.
And that's personal.
Those are people who studied languages, who memorized the history of their country, who built careers around showing the world a place that the world refused to look at.
The sanctions didn't just cut off Iran's oil revenue.
They cut off this other thing, this soft connection between Iranians and the rest of humanity.
Los viajeros conectan las personas.
Travelers connect people.
Los políticos no hacen esto.
Politicians don't do this.
That's a big statement, Octavio, and I think you mean it seriously.
Because there's a long tradition in political thought, going back at least to Montesquieu, this idea that commerce and travel create bonds between nations that make war less likely.
Doux commerce, he called it.
Gentle commerce.
Tourism is part of that.
Sí.
Yes.
Cuando viajas, ves personas normales.
When you travel, you see normal people.
No el gobierno.
Not the government.
Which is the whole tension, isn't it.
Because the same logic cuts the other way too.
Tourism also brings money to governments you might not want to fund.
You visit a country under an authoritarian regime, you spend your money there, some of that flows upward.
It's a genuine ethical knot that travelers and governments have been arguing about for decades.
Myanmar, Cuba, Corea del Norte.
Myanmar, Cuba, North Korea.
El problema es el mismo.
The problem is the same.
And Iran specifically is interesting because the tourism picture there was never simple even in the good years.
Western tourists faced restrictions that tourists in, say, Portugal don't think about.
Solo female travelers had to wear hijab, obviously.
You couldn't enter with an Israeli passport stamp.
Credit cards didn't work because of sanctions.
You had to carry cash in euros or dollars.
The whole experience was filtered through a layer of political reality that most tourism isn't.
Pero la gente va.
But people go.
Con dinero en efectivo, van.
With cash, they go.
They do.
I know people who did exactly that.
Stuffed their wallets full of euros in Istanbul before crossing the border.
And they came back evangelists.
Every single one of them.
Un viaje cambia tu opinión.
A trip changes your opinion.
Esto es la magia del turismo.
This is the magic of tourism.
Now here's the part that I think is genuinely complicated about what happens next.
The physical infrastructure of Iran, the sites, the mosques, the ancient ruins, those largely survived.
The war was fought mostly around nuclear facilities and military installations, not in the historic centers of Isfahan or Shiraz.
But the psychological infrastructure of tourism takes much longer to rebuild.
La gente tiene miedo.
People are afraid.
Leen las noticias y tienen miedo.
They read the news and they're afraid.
Right.
And the news does something very specific to a place's reputation.
The images that travel globally during a conflict become the reference point for a generation.
If your visual association with Iran is military hardware and explosions, it takes years of different images to replace that.
Croatia is a perfect example.
I remember covering the Balkan conflicts in the early nineties.
Dubrovnik under siege.
Now it's Game of Thrones filming locations and cruise ships.
That rehabilitation took roughly twenty years.
Croacia es muy popular hoy.
Croatia is very popular today.
Mucha gente va en verano.
Many people go in summer.
Too popular, some would say.
There's a whole other conversation about overtourism that we could have.
But let's stay on Iran for a moment, because there's another layer here that's specific to this conflict.
This war was not neutral in how the world perceived it.
It had supporters and opponents.
People's governments took sides.
That colors where people choose to travel.
En España, mucha gente no quiere visitar países en guerra.
In Spain, many people don't want to visit countries at war.
Es normal.
It's normal.
And that hesitation doesn't evaporate the moment a ceasefire is declared.
The State Department travel advisory, which for many American travelers functions almost like law even when it technically isn't, will take time to change.
Insurance companies won't cover trips until they do.
Airlines will wait for those signals.
The whole system has inertia.
Pero los jóvenes no esperan.
But young people don't wait.
Los mochileros van rápido.
Backpackers go fast.
They always do.
And honestly, talking to people who have traveled in those immediate post-conflict windows, there's something almost unrepeatable about it.
The place is still raw.
The people are overwhelmed that you came.
There's a clarity to the encounter that gets smoothed over once the tour buses arrive.
Los iraníes hablan inglés bien.
Iranians speak English well.
Los turistas pueden comunicarse.
Tourists can communicate.
Remarkably well, actually.
The literacy rate in Iran is very high, English education is widespread, and there's a younger generation that has had satellite television and internet access, however filtered, for years.
The cultural appetite there is genuine.
I remember speaking with a young man in Tehran in 2007 who could quote Joan Didion.
I was not expecting Joan Didion.
Cuando viajas, encuentras sorpresas.
When you travel, you find surprises.
Eso es lo mejor.
That's the best part.
That might be the cleanest summary of why travel matters that I've heard in years.
And what I keep coming back to with Iran specifically, with this news this week, is that there are forty-five million Iranians under the age of forty who have lived their entire adult lives under some combination of sanctions, internal repression, and now war.
What do they want from the world?
And what does the world owe them in terms of showing up?
Quieren contacto.
They want contact.
Quieren hablar con personas de otros países.
They want to talk with people from other countries.
And that, to me, is the argument for traveling to difficult places.
Not the ruins, as magnificent as they are.
Not the food, which by the way is spectacular, have you eaten Persian food properly?
No.
No.
Pero quiero ir.
But I want to go.
¿El arroz es bueno?
Is the rice good?
Octavio.
The rice in Iran is its own civilization.
They have a word, tahdig, for the crispy crust at the bottom of the pot, and people fight over it at the table.
The cuisine involves pomegranates, walnuts, saffron, combinations that should not work together and absolutely do.
It is not getting the recognition it deserves on the world stage.
Hablas de arroz con mucha pasión, Fletcher.
You talk about rice with so much passion, Fletcher.
Siempre.
Always.
Don't deflect.
My point stands.
The case for Iranian tourism, once the infrastructure reopens, once travel advisories shift, is actually strong.
Not in spite of everything that has happened, but partly because of it.
The world has been paying attention to Iran for the wrong reasons.
There might finally be an opportunity to look at it for the right ones.
Oye, dijiste antes 'los mochileros van'.
Hey, you said earlier 'backpackers go.' Mochilero, what is that exactly?
Mochilero, ¿qué es eso exactamente?
Ha.
You're catching my Spanish.
Well, mochila is backpack, right?
So a mochilero is literally a backpack person.
A backpacker.
Which is a fun word because in English we use the thing they carry to describe the kind of traveler they are, and in Spanish you do the same thing.
Sí.
Yes.
Mochila viene del náhuatl.
Mochila comes from Nahuatl.
Del idioma de México antiguo.
From the language of ancient Mexico.
Wait, really?
The word for backpack in Spanish comes from an indigenous Mexican language?
Sí.
Yes.
Muchas palabras en español vienen del náhuatl.
Many Spanish words come from Nahuatl.
Chocolate, tomate, aguacate.
Chocolate, tomato, avocado.
So when a Spanish backpacker travels to Iran, they're carrying a word from ancient Mexico on their back.
That is either the most poetic thing about travel I've heard, or I've been awake too long.
Las dos cosas son posibles, Fletcher.
Both things are possible, Fletcher.
Fair.
So mochila, from Nahuatl, meaning something like bag or bundle.
Mochilero, the traveler who carries one.
And somehow that word, which crossed the Atlantic from Mexico to Spain centuries ago, is now what you use to describe the kind of traveler who might one day be the first one back in Tehran after the ceasefire holds.
History is weird.
El idioma viaja también.
Language travels too.
Como las personas.
Like people.