We should not be surprised if such changes occur. Summer was not always about the seaside and sunbathing. True, there is a long tradition, dating back at least to the Romans, of leaving the city for the seashore in the summer months. Baiae, on the northern tip of the Gulf of Naples, was a favorite haunt of the emperors Augustus, Nero and Caligula. (According to Seneca the Younger, it was a “harbor of vice.”) But activities such as swimming in the sea and stripping semi-naked to lie on the beach are of quite recent provenance.
Moreover, the seaside is not an appealing summer location in much of the world. No sweat-soaked imperial civil servant in British-ruled India would have chosen the Bay of Bengal as his preferred holiday destination. The only way to escape the heat of the summer was — as Rudyard Kipling described — to flee the plains and head northwards to Himalayan “hill stations” such as Simla.
Now that summer in more and more of the world is as searingly hot as India in Kipling’s time, we are all going to have to take a leaf out of his book. The hill station is coming back, and this time it’s global.
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