The tourist experience: the process of encounter between tourists and locals and their mutual concealment

From an anthropological perspective, this article aims to analyze the tourist expe-rience understood as a social drama obser-ved from the encounter between tourists and locals, an inharmonious process that gene -rates conflicts between the actors involved, given that each group assigns a symbolic plot to their performance during this pro-cess. Regarding the methodology, the work arose from the theoretical-discursive study of Victor Turner's anthropology of the experience, through a narrative and bibliographic review of previous works on the subject, to reflect on the approach carried out by other authors. The result of the analysis allows us to establish that the encounter between tourists and locals is interpreted as an unsatisfactory tourist experience, in which a mechanism of mutual concealment is noticed since each group chooses from the universe of the other a series of symbols that communicate through an unequal, conflictive, and of mutual avoidance relationship due to the cultural shock caused by the social interaction of the entities involved.