So many walls around the world are attracting tourists
Aug 21, 2018, 7:04 AM
The Sept. 24, 2014 photo shows the area of former Checkpoint Charlie where US President John F Kennedy looked over the wall during his visit in 1963 in Berlin, Germany. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
(AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
I just spent 10 days touring Northern Europe, including Visby (which is in Sweden), Tallinn (the capital of Estonia), and Berlin.
And I noticed one interesting thing: the main attractions in these places were walls.
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Visby is a medieval city on the Island of Gotland, which was attacked by the Germans, the Danes, and the Swedes. So it needed a wall. It’s still there today.
It was a similar story in Tallinn, Estonia where the wall had 66 guard towers, many of which are still there.
And while most of the Berlin Wall has been replaced by a double line of cobblestones marking where it used to be, it’s not entirely gone either. About a mile of the actual wall remains as an outdoor art gallery. Near the old guard shack at Checkpoint Charlie, for 10 euros, you can see a 60-foot high panoramic mural of what Berlin used to looked like when the wall was still there.
And all these places are packed with wall-seeking tourists – people who want to see the wall, touch the wall, climb the wall. And they will pay to do it. I paid seven euros to climb a guard tower in Estonia.
So, it may take a few hundred years, but I can see where a 100 percent American border wall could one day also join the list of walls that were built to keep people out, but are now packing them in.
It might even pay for itself.
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