When the Beaches Are Gone, What Will Be Left?
- Pascal Lagesse
- 8 minutes ago
- 6 min read
People often speak about art as if it were the last thing you add to a country, a little decoration once the serious work is done. I have spent more than forty years painting, and I have come to believe the opposite. Art and culture are not the icing. In many of the most successful countries on earth, they are part of the foundation. They build cities, fill hotels, create jobs, and give a country a face the whole world can recognise. I want to walk through some of the numbers, because they are more striking than most people imagine, and then I want to talk about home. So, when the beaches are gone, what will be left?
Culture is an economy, not a hobby
Let me start with the two economies.
In the United States, arts and cultural production added around 1.2 trillion dollars to the economy in 2023. That is not a rounding error. It came to about 4.2 per cent of the entire national GDP and supported roughly 5.4 million jobs. What surprised me most is the pace. That year, the arts sector grew more than twice as fast as the wider American economy. Culture was not lagging behind. It was pulling ahead.
The United Kingdom tells the same story. Its creative industries contributed an estimated 145.8 billion pounds to the economy in 2024, close to 5.5 per cent of the country's output, and they employ about 2.4 million people. The creative sector grew around four times faster than the UK economy as a whole. When a government in London talks about the creative industries today, it talks about them as an engine, not an ornament.
So the first fact is simple. Where countries take culture seriously, culture pays them back.
A single landmark can become a country's face
Now think about how people actually choose where to travel. According to the United Nations World Tourism Organisation, cultural tourism accounts for roughly 40 per cent of all tourism worldwide. Four out of every ten journeys are shaped, at least in part, by something cultural. A museum, a monument, a festival, a history someone wants to stand inside for an afternoon.
Consider the Eiffel Tower. Around seven million people climb it every year, but its real value is far larger than the tickets it sells. A 2012 study estimated the tower's worth to the French economy at about 435 billion euros, based not on its steel but on its image and its pull. That figure is a symbolic estimate rather than a price tag, yet it was put at roughly a fifth of France's entire GDP. One structure, built for a world fair, became shorthand for an entire nation. Add the Louvre, the most visited museum on the planet, and you begin to see why around thirty million people travel to Paris in a single year. They are not only coming for the weather.
The clearest proof: Bilbao
If someone still doubts that culture can rebuild an economy, I point them to Bilbao.
In the 1980s, Bilbao was a declining industrial city in northern Spain, heavy with unemployment. Then, in 1997, it opened a single building: the Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Gehry, for a cost of around 100 million euros. What happened next became so well known that economists gave it a name, the Bilbao Effect. Annual visitors to the city jumped from about 100,000 to more than a million. By 2023, the museum's own figures put its contribution to the city's economy at more than 650 million euros a year, supporting close to 14,000 jobs. The public money spent to build it was recovered through tax revenue within only a few years.
One museum turned a struggling city into a destination. That is the power we are talking about.
Singapore understood this on purpose
France and Spain had centuries of heritage to draw on. What moves me even more is a country that decided to build cultural capital almost from scratch, as a matter of national strategy.
Singapore is a small island with no ancient monuments and no reputation as a beach paradise. Yet in the year 2000 its government unveiled the Renaissance City Plan, a deliberate strategy to become what it called a global city for the arts. This was not sentiment. It was policy, tied openly to tourism, to attracting talent, and to national identity. Singapore built the Esplanade, its Theatres on the Bay, at a cost of around 600 million dollars. It created the Singapore Art Museum, the Asian Civilisations Museum, the National Museum, and later the National Gallery Singapore. A country that could have relied only on trade and finance chose to treat culture as infrastructure, as essential as its ports and its airport. Today its cultural landscape is one of the reasons people give for wanting to live there and visit.
Singapore looked at the world, saw how culture builds a nation's value, and simply decided to do it.
And then there is Mauritius
Now I come home, and here my heart tightens a little.
Tourism is one of the great pillars of the Mauritian economy. In 2024 we welcomed around 1.38 million visitors, and tourism contributes somewhere in the region of 13 to 14 per cent of our GDP, making it the third pillar of the country. Most of those visitors come from Europe, and France is our single largest market. It is a beautiful success story, and I do not want to diminish it.
But I want to be honest about what nearly all of it rests on. It rests on sand.
The overwhelming majority of people who fly to Mauritius come for the beaches and the lagoon. And the beaches are leaving us. Sea levels around the island have been rising faster than the global average, and the erosion is already visible to anyone who drives along the north or the west. Studies show that around a quarter of our beaches are actively eroding, and in some places the shoreline has retreated by up to twenty metres in recent decades. Warmer seas are bleaching our coral, and a dying reef no longer breaks the waves the way it used to, which only speeds the loss. One projection suggests beach erosion alone could cost the Mauritian economy up to fifty million dollars in tourism revenue by 2050.
So I ask the question that keeps me awake. If the sand disappears, and we have built nothing else, what is left to bring the world to our door?
That is the danger of standing on a single leg. When a country's whole appeal is one fragile asset, and that asset is melting into the sea, the future is not something you can simply hope through.
Culture is the asset that does not wash away
Here is the hopeful part, and it is the reason I paint.
We are not an empty island waiting for the tide. Mauritius already holds two UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and both of them are cultural rather than natural. Le Morne, that great mountain I return to again and again in my own work, tells the story of enslaved people who chose freedom over capture. Aapravasi Ghat in Port Louis holds the memory of the indentured labourers whose arrival helped shape the nation. We have séga, born here and nowhere else. We have a genuinely rare mixture of African, Indian, Chinese, and European life that most countries can only dream of claiming. We have artists, musicians, writers, and craftspeople.
Culture is the one asset that does not erode. A beach can vanish in a storm. A story, a song, a painting, a museum, a signature landmark; these things do not wash away with the next spring tide. They deepen with time. If Mauritius invested in its artists and its cultural landmarks with even a fraction of the seriousness that Singapore has shown, we would be building a reason for the world to come here that no rising sea can take from us.
I am not asking anyone to choose between the ocean and the easel. I am saying that a wise country protects itself by having more than one thing to offer. The developed world has already proved that art and culture are not a luxury a nation earns after it is rich. They are one of the ways a nation becomes rich, and stays that way.
I paint joy because I believe the world needs it. But I have also come to believe that joy, and the culture that carries it, is one of the most durable investments a small island can make. When the beaches are thin, I want there to be something left that still says, unmistakably, this is Mauritius.
Let us build it now, while there is still time.
