Dark Tourism: The Ethics and Extraordinary Sites of Travelling to Places of Tragedy

The academic term "dark tourism" was coined by John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, both then at Glasgow Caledonian University, in their 2000 book of the same title. They used it to describe travel to sites of death, atrocity, and tragedy: battlefields, concentration camps, disaster sites, prisons, and memorials to mass violence. The behaviour itself is as old as human history (pilgrims visited sites of martyrdom, citizens attended public executions, wealthy Europeans toured Pompeii within decades of its rediscovery in 1748), but Lennon and Foley's framing gave the field a name and launched a significant body of academic work examining why people visit these places, what effects those visits have, and what obligations site managers have to the dead as well as to the living visitor. This guide examines the ethical framework, the range of sites from the most to the least morally complex, and the specific experience of visiting some of the most significant dark tourism destinations in the world.

The Academic Framework: A Spectrum of Darkness

Philip Stone, founder and director of the Institute for Dark Tourism Research at the University of Central Lancashire (the world's leading academic institution dedicated to studying the field), proposed a spectrum of "darkness" to describe the range of sites that fall under the dark tourism umbrella. The spectrum runs from "palest" to "darkest":

• Palest: dark fun factories (ghost tours, haunted houses, fictional death-themed entertainment) and dark exhibitions (museum displays about war, genocide, or natural disaster removed from the original site). These have the most educational intent and the least direct connection to actual death.
• Intermediate: dark resting places (famous cemeteries such as Père Lachaise in Paris, where tourists visit Jim Morrison's grave), dark shrines (roadside memorials, flower-laying sites at famous deaths), and dark conflict sites (battlefields, particularly those from conflicts now safely historical like Gettysburg or the Somme).
• Darkest: dark camps of genocide (Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Killing Fields, Srebrenica), purpose-built sites of mass murder where the intention to kill was the defining characteristic of the location. These are the most ethically complex because the site's original purpose was the elimination of human beings, and the visitor arrives to look at the mechanisms of that elimination.

Stone's framework is descriptive rather than prescriptive: he does not argue that darker sites should not be visited, but that different sites raise different ethical questions and deserve correspondingly different approaches from both visitor and site manager.

Auschwitz-Birkenau: The Foundational Dark Tourism Site

Auschwitz-Birkenau (officially the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Oświęcim, Poland) is the site of the Nazi German concentration and extermination camp complex where between 1.1 million and 1.5 million people were killed between 1940 and 1945, approximately 90% of them Jews. It is the most visited dark tourism site in the world, receiving approximately 1.7 million visitors in 2023. Entry is free, but timed tickets are required and must be booked weeks to months ahead, particularly for summer visits and for the most popular guided tours.

The site consists of two main areas: Auschwitz I (the original camp, 3km from Oświęcim town, containing the museum exhibitions, the gas chamber and crematorium that have been partially reconstructed, and the infamous gate with the "Arbeit Macht Frei" inscription) and Auschwitz II-Birkenau (3km away, a 175-hectare site containing the ruins of the four main crematoria and gas chambers (dynamited by the SS before liberation), the selection platform (the "ramp" where arriving prisoners were sorted by SS doctors), and the remains of prisoner barracks extending to the horizon). The Birkenau site, because of its scale, is often where the full comprehension of the camp's industrial character arrives most forcefully.

The ethical argument for visiting Auschwitz was articulated clearly by the Polish government, which administers the site: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" (Santayana's phrase, inscribed at Dachau) frames the institutional position that witness carries a moral weight. Visitor income (from guided tours, the on-site museum shop, and educational programmes) funds preservation: the physical fabric of the camp is actively deteriorating, and conservation efforts require continuous funding. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation has a €120 million conservation endowment that funds ongoing work.

How to visit respectfully: book a guided tour rather than walking independently (the context provided by knowledgeable guides, many of whom are Polish historians specialising in the camp's history, is essential for understanding what you are looking at); follow the site's photography guidelines (photography is permitted in most areas but specifically prohibited in certain spaces including the hair display in Block 4, out of respect for victims); dress modestly; maintain respectful behaviour throughout. The museum provides explicit guidance and will remove visitors who behave inappropriately.

The Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng, Cambodia

The Choeung Ek Genocidal Center, 15km south of Phnom Penh, is the most visited of more than 300 documented Killing Fields across Cambodia, sites where the Khmer Rouge government (1975–1979) transported, murdered, and buried the victims of its purges. Under Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea, between 1.5 million and 2 million people, roughly 25% of Cambodia's 1975 population, died from execution, forced labour, starvation, and disease. Choeung Ek was the primary execution site for prisoners from the S-21 detention centre (Tuol Sleng) in Phnom Penh.

Entry to Choeung Ek costs $6. The audio guide, narrated in part by survivors and descendants of victims, is essential and is included in the entry fee. It takes approximately 90 minutes to walk the site at a pace that allows the audio commentary to be heard properly. The central Buddhist stupa contains 8,000 human skulls recovered from the mass graves; the site continues to surface bone fragments and teeth from the soil after rains. This physical surfacing of human remains is unlike any other dark tourism site in terms of its immediacy.

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, 15km away in central Phnom Penh (entry $3), occupies the former Chao Ponhea Yat High School converted by the Khmer Rouge into Security Prison 21 (S-21). Between 14,000 and 17,000 people were processed through S-21; fewer than 20 survived. The photography project undertaken by Duch's administration, recording every prisoner on arrival, means that thousands of faces of the dead are displayed in the museum, a photographic archive of extraordinary moral weight. Several of the seven survivors still living in the 2010s visited the museum as informal guides; at least two passed away in recent years.

Hiroshima: The Most Thoughtfully Designed Memorial Site

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum represent what is arguably the most carefully designed memorial space in the world for a site of mass death. The atomic bomb dropped by the United States B-29 Enola Gay on 6 August 1945 killed between 70,000 and 80,000 people instantly and a further 60,000–80,000 by the end of 1945 from radiation and injuries. The Genbaku Dome (Hiroshima Peace Memorial), the structural skeleton of the Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall that survived the blast because the bomb detonated almost directly above it (600m altitude, 160m horizontal distance), was preserved as a reminder and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum underwent a major redesign that reopened in 2019, shifting its curatorial emphasis from geopolitical context and scientific documentation of the bomb's effects toward individual human stories: the belongings of specific victims, their photographs, their family testimonies. The redesign was controversial among some historians who felt it reduced the political and military context, but it has been widely praised for making the human cost of nuclear weapons comprehensible at an individual rather than statistical level. The museum also contains materials relating to the hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) movement and their decades of advocacy for nuclear disarmament. Entry: ¥200 (approximately £1).

The Memorial Park contains the Children's Peace Monument, inspired by Sadako Sasaki (a survivor who developed leukemia at age 11 from radiation exposure and died in 1955 after folding 644 paper cranes in the hope that reaching 1,000 would grant her wish to recover), the Peace Memorial Flame (which will be extinguished, according to the city's stated intention, only when the last nuclear weapon is destroyed), and the Cenotaph for the A-bomb Victims, which frames the Genbaku Dome across the Motoyasu River in a deliberate sightline.

The 9/11 Memorial Museum, New York

The National September 11 Memorial and Museum in lower Manhattan opened in 2014, on the footprint of the destroyed World Trade Center towers. The two reflecting pools set within the building footprints, each nearly an acre in area with the largest manmade waterfalls in the United States cascading into a central void, are among the most powerful public memorial installations of the 21st century. The names of 2,977 victims are inscribed on the bronze parapets around the pools, arranged not alphabetically but by proximity: people who were together in their last moments are adjacent in the memorial.

The museum below ground has attracted sustained criticism from two directions simultaneously: that it is not sufficiently respectful of the dead (its gift shop sells mugs and key rings, and critics including some victim families have questioned the commercialisation), and that its narrative of the attack's political context is insufficient for a full understanding of the event. The museum's design decision to display victim photographs in the In Memoriam exhibition hall, where the individual faces of the 2,977 dead are presented with brief biographies, creates an experience that functions differently from the object-based displays in other parts of the museum. Entry: $33 for adults; first responders and emergency personnel enter free.

Robben Island: Memorial Run by Those Who Were Imprisoned There

Robben Island, 12km off the coast of Cape Town in Table Bay, was South Africa's maximum-security political prison from 1964 to 1991. Nelson Mandela served 18 of his 27 years of imprisonment here; Ahmed Kathrada, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, and other leaders of the African National Congress were imprisoned in the same cell block. The island is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a museum, reached by ferry from the V&A Waterfront (R400/$22 including the ferry and tour; book weeks ahead in summer).

What makes Robben Island distinct among dark tourism sites is its guide structure: the island tours are conducted by former political prisoners. The men who were imprisoned in the cells lead visitors through those cells and the limestone quarry where prisoners performed hard labour. Mandela's cell (B Section, Cell 5) is shown; the guide for this section of the tour is, or was until recently, a man who knew Mandela personally during their shared imprisonment. The moral and historical authority of this arrangement is irreplaceable and will not persist indefinitely as the generation of prisoners ages. Visiting now, while former prisoners are still able to guide, is qualitatively different from visiting in twenty years' time.

Chernobyl: An Uncertain Future

The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in northern Ukraine, site of the April 1986 nuclear disaster at Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (the worst nuclear accident in history, releasing 400 times more radiation than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima), reopened for tourism in 2010 following years of restricted scientific access. By 2019, following the HBO miniseries Chernobyl (which increased Exclusion Zone tourism by approximately 35% in the months after broadcast), the zone was receiving around 120,000 tourists annually.

That tourism ended with Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russian forces occupied the Exclusion Zone in the opening days of the invasion, damaging infrastructure, disturbing the contaminated soil, and affecting some radiation monitoring equipment before withdrawing. The zone's future as a tourist destination as of mid-2025 remains uncertain, contingent on the war's outcome, the reconstruction of Ukrainian infrastructure, and assessment of what the Russian occupation did to the site's physical condition. The ghost city of Pripyat, the New Safe Confinement dome over Reactor 4, and the surrounding forest remain among the most compelling dark tourism sites on Earth in concept; when they become safely accessible again is an open question.

How to Engage With Dark Tourism Respectfully

The question of how to behave at sites of tragedy is not always intuitive. Some practical principles that emerge from both academic research and the explicit guidance of site managers:

• Research before you arrive: understanding the history of what happened at a site before you arrive transforms the experience from spectacle to witness. At Auschwitz, at Tuol Sleng, at the Killing Fields, the numbers are so large that they can become abstractions unless you have read specific stories of individuals who were killed there.
• Follow site rules on photography: each site has different guidance, and it is always specific to the site's interpretation of what photography does to the experience and to the dignity of the dead. At Auschwitz, some spaces prohibit photography entirely; at Robben Island, respectful photography is permitted throughout. When in doubt, observe what your guide does.
• Consider your photographic choices independently of the rules: even where photography is permitted, the selfie in front of a gas chamber has become a recognisable symbol of dark tourism at its least thoughtful. The academic and ethical criticism of this behaviour is not that photography is inherently disrespectful but that certain compositions treat sites of mass murder as backdrops for self-promotion.
• Allow time: sites of this gravity are not efficiently consumed. Auschwitz-Birkenau requires a full day; the Hiroshima museum requires three to four hours to experience properly. Rushing through a genocide memorial to catch a train misses the entire point of the visit.
• Support the sites financially: entry fees, guided tour costs, museum shop purchases, and donations to conservation funds at sites where entry is free (Auschwitz's conservation programme is donation-funded) contribute directly to the preservation of physical evidence of historical events that must not be forgotten.

Dark tourism, when practised with genuine intent and basic respect, is one of the more serious and legitimate things a traveller can do with their time and money. The alternative, of avoiding these sites on the grounds that they make one uncomfortable, is a choice to remain comfortably ignorant of events that shaped the world. The sites themselves, and the people who manage them, mostly do not want that.

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