I hate traveling on vacation

This is my favorite week of the year. Summer has just begun. With its promises of what's to come. With the magic of St. John's Eve, the night in which we burn away the bad things that came. Two months ago, a friend changed her password to "I love summer2025." She 's been spreading her enthusiasm ever since. Everything is about to happen. Our WhatsApp group is called that now, and it reminds me daily of the things I love about summer.

Naps, swims, sunsets. Beach chairs, summer reading, peaches. I like lazy summers : the ones in Rohmer 's films where nothing seems to happen, those with a touch of childhood nostalgia that Marta Jiménez Serrano captured so well in Los nombres propios .

There are things I miss about summer . The school holidays, the stays at Grandma's house... my grandmother.

There are also things I hate about summer: the heat in Madrid, the mosquitoes, the traveling. Especially the traveling.

I hate going far away on vacation, and I'm glad to know I'm not alone. "Traditionally, tourists travel to become something else, to forget who they are, or to try to discover who they are, always with poor results ," warned Anna Pacheco in I Was Here and I Remembered Us .

There's evidence that travel isn't as exciting as we've been told. We don't like hearing others tell us about their getaways. We don't like doing "touristy things" in our own cities, even though we always succumb to them when we're away. Travel promises to be transformative, but it's our cities that have truly changed.

This was explained in an essay in the New Yorker published a couple of years ago: "Against Travel." According to the text, it's difficult for a monument or a painting to provide the revelation promised by the guidebooks. So much expectation often leads to disappointment . Emerson, who called travel an "idiot's paradise," confessed: "I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I pretend to be intoxicated by the sights and suggestions, but I am not."

Coda: When I told a friend the subject of this column, she said I couldn't write it without clarifying that I'm Galician . In fact, I don't know a single Galician living in Madrid who wouldn't prefer to spend their summer at home rather than travel far away. Architect Chipperfield gave an explanation in these pages : "At first, I thought it was due to a certain lack of adventure. I wondered: why don't they want to spend their holidays in Japan or Miami? And I soon deduced that they're fine in their own space ."