Between January and April 2023, the temporary exhibition “A news workshop. Inside the Diario Información”, which explains how a newspaper was made, specifically the Información, with the existing mechanical technology until the irruption of offset in 1980. In addition to part of the elements used in the printing process, such as the large linotype that occupies the center of the room or the table where the typesetters composed the entire newspaper page by page, six copies of the Diario información dated between 1947 and 1965 are exhibited, in order to facilitate the observation of the changes applied in its design, but also in the structure of its sections. If we stop to look at these old newspaper copies, we will find a number of news items that, today, after sixty or seventy years, are most curious to us, but also help us to see with perspective how our environment has evolved in all this time.

We will focus in this text on analyzing the reviews that were made of events related to tourism or the visit of people from abroad to our land, something that we currently take for granted, but that in times of autarky was really an event worthy of mention. mention. Thus, in April 1958 we read some brief news items dealing with the subject, which we transcribe here:

MORE TOURISTS THAN THE PREVIOUS YEAR

This year the movement of travelers to Elche far exceeds the previous one. Thus, for example, in March 1957, sixty foreigners were attended to at the Tourist Office, while last month there were three hundred and sixty who went there for the same purpose.

It should also be noted that not all tourists go to the aforementioned office to tour Elche and its palm orchards

BELGIANS TO THE MYSTERY OF ELCHE

At the Tourism Office, located on the ground floor of the Elche Town Hall, a letter has been received from a Belgian tourist agency, in which it requests data and prices related to the existing project in that country for the arrival of Belgians next month. August, in order to present the sacred-lyrical drama <>.

As is natural, they have responded on the spot to what was requested in it, attaching at the same time explanatory brochures on the city and its artistic monuments.

Today we find it curious to find the news in the visit of a group of Belgians, but this invites us to reflect on what the social reality was at the time those lines were written, on the immense work carried out in the tourism sector and in many others to travel the path traveled in these decades.

Undoubtedly, the news in which we find the most interest is the one that appeared on Sunday, November 29, 1964, in which it is detailed how the works of the El Altet airport will be, still to be built at that time, and in which some amounts are launched that at that time were mere predictions. The headline of the piece of news is "375 hectares will occupy the El Altet airport", and it is noted "Some four thousand passengers are estimated on the peak day of 1971, and almost one hundred and nineteen thousand in September of that year", were astronomical data at that time. moment (in case we are curious, Aena reported that in the month of September 2022, with tourism not yet fully recovered after the Covid pandemic, 1,356,590 travelers passed through our airport, and that in those nine first months of the year exceeded 10 million).

And it is that tourism has been a subject of provincial interest since long before what we perhaps think, as this news shows, and as a poster that we have hung in the exhibition also attests, on it on an orange background a large palm tree of red color behind which a yellow sun appears, at the bottom of the poster a message in two languages, German and Spanish: "Do like the sun: Spend the winter in Alicante!".

Author: José Aniorte, cultural manager of the School Museum.