What is undertourism?

Undertourism means choosing — and supporting — destinations that receive far fewer visitors than they could carry. It is the opposite of overtourism, and the working principle of this site: 104 places in 24 European countries, each one measured, none of them crowded.

Two meanings of one word

The word is used in two related senses, and both are legitimate. The first is a condition: a destination with beds, trains, restaurants and a landscape ready for visitors who do not come, or come only in August. Seen from the place, undertourism is an economic problem — empty capacity, seasonal work, young people leaving. The second is a practice: the traveller's deliberate preference for the lesser-known place over the saturated one. Seen from the traveller, undertourism is a choice, and increasingly a movement.

We use both. The first sense describes the places we cover; the second describes the people we write for. The connection between the two is the whole point: the visitor who chooses Aubusson over Avignon is not only avoiding a queue, they are moving demand towards somewhere that needs it.

Where the word comes from

Undertourism is an English coinage built in deliberate contrast to overtourism, the term that came to define the crowded summers of Venice, Barcelona and Dubrovnik from 2017 onwards. Where overtourism named a problem everyone could see, undertourism named its mirror image, which is harder to see precisely because nobody is there.

The word took hold first in Italy, where it filled a gap in the language of a country with too many tourists in a dozen places and too few in a thousand. The Accademia della Crusca, Italy's language academy, added undertourism to its list of new words in March 2025 and dates its first attestation in Italian to 2019. From 2021, as the pandemic pushed Europeans towards domestic and regional travel, the term spread through the travel press; by 2026 it was being described in Italian newspapers as the direction of the year. The Crusca entry, tellingly, records both meanings above.

Undertourism and overtourism

Overtourism is too many visitors for a place's capacity; undertourism is too few. They are not two problems but one: European tourism is extremely concentrated, and every visitor absorbed by a saturated city is a visitor missing from a region that would have welcomed them. Europe does not have too many tourists — it has too few destinations in circulation. The answer to overtourism is not fewer travellers; it is a longer list of places to go.

How we measure it

Every destination on this site carries a Density Score from 1 to 10. Forty per cent of it is tourist density — overnight stays per resident per year, from Eurostat's regional tourism statistics at NUTS-2 level, compared with the national median rather than a European average, because "quiet" in Croatia is not "quiet" in Estonia. The rest is seasonality, position outside the country's main tourism region, and evidence of local actors able to carry the tourism they receive. Nothing publishes above 5. The full method is on the methodology page.

The undertourism index

The index currently holds 104 destinations in 24 countries and 67 regions. Scores run from 0.5 to 4.5, with a median of 2.3. These are the ten quietest places on it — the lowest scores relative to their own country.

By country, the index reads: Italy 31, Slovenia 9, Spain 8, Ireland 8, France 6, Greece 6, Czechia 5, Portugal 5, Poland 4, Romania 4, Croatia 3, Hungary 2, Slovakia 2, Austria 1, Belgium 1, Bulgaria 1, Germany 1, Denmark 1, Estonia 1, Finland 1, Lithuania 1, Latvia 1, Norway 1, Sweden 1. Italy is over-represented on purpose: it is where the word was born and where the gap between the crowded dozen and the quiet thousand is widest. The full index can be filtered by month, theme and train access.

What undertourism is not

It is not "undiscovered": every place on the index is somewhere people live, work and have hosted guests for generations. It is not cheap travel, although it is often cheaper. It is not anti-tourism — the places on this site want visitors, which is why they are here. And it is not a licence to send a crowd somewhere small: capacity is part of the score, and a destination at its limit is removed, however quiet it looks on paper.

Common questions

Sources: Accademia della Crusca, Parole nuove: undertourism (2025); Eurostat, regional tourism statistics (NUTS-2, latest annual release); our own methodology, v1.0. This page is also available in Italian. Cite it as: undertourism.eu, "What is undertourism?", https://undertourism.eu/undertourism.