Paris was so crowded that I took a stroll in a cemetery

Eiffel Tower and Seine River at sunrise, Paris, France

On our last day in Paris, we visited a cemetery. It was dead. “Isn’t this nice,” I said, ambling past the real estate of long-dead Parisians. Our pace was slow, the birdsong bright and the only other visitors were relatives placing fresh flowers on graves and sweeping the gravestone as they would a threshold.

A visit to a cemetery wasn’t on our itinerary but the previous few days of muscling past crowds, queuing for hundreds of metres to see a minor exhibition and bouncing from restaurant to restaurant hoping for a spare table had exhausted our reserves of tourism stamina.

In all that time the closest we’d come to seeing Parisians, apart from frazzled wait staff, was those lying peacefully under slabs of marble, visited by a few loyal relatives. I wondered what they would think of their Paris today.

It’s hard to complain about crowds when you are contributing to the feet in the queue but this year’s invasion of Europe by travel-starved tourists is so pronounced that it’s easy to imagine that this might be the last time for those destinations.

This winter every second Australian who still has savings seems to be in Europe, the number of Americans there has rocketed 55 per cent on last year’s figures, which were 600 per cent up on the locked-down previous year. Expressions such as over-touristed and peak tourism are creeping into travel advice. In Europe, they’re all Venetians now.

For visitors, the competition is fierce – up early, queue early, buy early, book early and know your way around the ropes. But for locals, it must be sad to see their local streets become entertainment zones for the world. Some are fighting back. They are limiting the entry of buses and cars, erecting banners that urge consideration of locals, building fences around Insta spots and one, Portofino, has introduced fines for hanging around (in a bid to stop pedestrian jams around picturesque spots).

Cities can’t do that. They can just get more expensive, more unpleasant and, increasingly, relegated to photo albums of previous years. See Rome and don’t bother again. Paris in spring, just once.

There are solutions for Europhiles and most of them involve thinking like a local. There are mid-sized cities, country towns and strips of the coast that have yet to make it on to destination boards and, this year, are hoping not to make it on to any lists of the least crowded spots on the Continent. Most are a little hard to get to. You might need to catch a train or a ferry, or both. Many don’t have taxis in town or a regular bus service. You either drive yourself or beg the owner of the guesthouse for a pick-up. And, yes, they are more likely to have guesthouses than hotels. In these places, there are visitors but most are Europeans; there are fewer English speakers and chances are you’ll struggle to pronounce the name of the place.

Un-touristed places are limited by their ­infrastructure, so summer crowds are not a problem and, in the off-season, some shops and restaurants will be closed but there will always be a few that stay open for locals and visitors like you. They will even appreciate your visit.

The grand tour of Europe may well be closing for us, but at least the great detour around Europe is just beginning, even if we whined about dragging our bags along sand-swept roads and wobbled on bikes to beaches devoid of cabanas and cocktails.

(Postscript. We were told we could visit the grave of Susan Sontag in the cemetery but we didn’t need to see any more tourists.)

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