‘… sometimes you’ve just got to get away’: On trekking holidays and their therapeutic effect

Abstract

A traditional Romantic fix for the stress and strain of the everyday has been the idea of ‘getting back to nature’, exploring places of natural grandeur and beauty based on the belief in nature’s therapeutic agency on the traveller. This article introduces a theoretical framework that offers a way to explore how touristic spaces are lived within a human–non-human co-constituted affective process. It then engages with the spaces of nature-based tourism and reports findings from an ethnographic study on British-based trekking holiday to Iceland. These findings suggest that the emotions and therapeutic affect that have traditionally been reported from spending time in nature are relational outcomes; they depend both on nature’s performance and on what the individual contributes to the relations.