Instrumentalising Peripherality: Early Czech Tourism and the Making of the Bohemian Forest As a Destination

A region’s peripheral status plays a key role in shaping its tourism development. At the end of the 19th century, the Bohemian Forest became a desirable nature-based tourism destination. This article explores how Czech tourism in the Bohemian Forest before World War I instrumentalised peripherality by actively engaging with and transforming the region’s peripheral status as part of the process of making it a desirable destination.

Through an analysis of historical tourist media representations, the study finds that a range of activists and entrepreneurs promoted the peripheral region through drawing attention to the aesthetic appeal of the landscape and by making comparisons to other mountain regions. Socio-economic disparities between urban middle-class tourists and local forest and small-scale industrial workers were ameliorated through charitable initiatives that built symbolic connections between the centre and the periphery. Infrastructure, particularly railways and inns, influenced tourist flows and spatial hierarchies. Additionally, tourism served as a tool for national activism.

The functional dynamic between central representations and local responses can be seen as a resilience strategy. Infrastructural developments, appropriation of symbolic framings, and aesthetic associations enabled the region to adapt to shifting cultural and political contexts, such as the rise of tourism and the growing importance of national identification, as well as outcomes of rapid landscape and societal changes, as seen after the bark beetle outbreak.