Is this really how you want to spend your holiday? We’ve lost our minds

July 8, 2026 — 5:00am

The queue down Arrandegi Kalea must be at least 100 people long, snaking down from the middle of the block all the way into the big space outside the old San Sebastian fish market. It begins at the door to Bar Nestor, the steak specialist that always used to be popular, though now it’s gone supersonic.

Nestor doesn’t open for another hour, and even then, only 20 or so people will be able to get in at a time. Many diners in this queue won’t be eating the bar’s renowned triumvirate – steak, padron peppers and tomatoes – for at least a few hours. They will spend one of their precious days in San Sebastian standing in line, slowly shuffling forward for hours, and hours, and hours.

They’re doing this because Bar Nestor has become famous. Internet famous. Social media famous.

When I lived in San Sebastian in 2019, before COVID-19 changed so much, you could always just walk straight into Nestor. You would have to stand at the back of a crowd of people and wiggle your way up to the bar, shouting out your order to one of the smiling owners, Nestor and Tito, before trying to find a place to perch your plates.

But you wouldn’t ever have to queue outside the restaurant.

Then, the influencers arrived: big foodie influencers with massive social media followings. People like Topjaw, and Eating With Tod, and Mark Wiens at Migrationology. Once these guys arrive, every visitor knows the San Sebastian hotspots, and they are prepared to stand in line for hours for the privilege of experiencing them.

We’ve lost our minds, collectively, as travellers. We’ve lost the skill of discernment. We’ve given in truly and wholly to the idea that the most popular experiences, or at least the ones we’ve seen fed to us on our phones over and over again, are the best, the most desirable, the boxes that need to be checked.

It’s not just Bar Nestor; not even in San Sebastian. People queue down the street for the tortilla at Antonio Bar now for 45 minutes or more for a slice of omelette.

But people queue in Australia too – in Melbourne for Lune croissants and Hector’s sandwiches, in Sydney for a Happyfield version of a McDonald’s classic. We even queued for Cinnabon when it first arrived, which is frankly embarrassing.

It’s not just food, either. There are queues forming around the world right now that travellers are only too happy to join, mostly to get the photo of the thing that everyone else has already got a photo of, because then you can show you’ve been there and got the same photo.

Cappadocia in Turkey has formed an entire industry around dawn rooftop photoshoots, with hot air balloons floating in the background. Santorini’s streets are filled with wannabe social media stars lining up at the best viewpoints. Preikestolen in Norway looks perfectly untouched once you crop out the queue of influencers waiting to get their own shots.

It’s tempting to lay the blame for this phenomenon solely on social media, though that feels a little simplistic. I can remember queuing for what certainly felt like hours for the Space Mountain rollercoaster at Disneyland about 30 years ago.

Still, you can’t deny the magnifying effect social media tends to have on these once little-known sights and experiences and even dishes. Visual apps such as Instagram and TikTok encourage a hyper-fixation on just a few places, each post by a big account encouraging another post by another big account, which then encourages follower after follower with their own accounts, until the popularity of these places becomes an unstoppable, unmanageable wave.

Is this really how you want to spend your holidays? Standing in line for the dish everyone else is eating?

I have to confess that I have endured some very long waits in the pursuit of good food, pretty much always in Japan. The way ramen restaurants there can survive while charging only $10 to $15 a bowl for something so artisanal and labour-intensive is to ensure high turnover of customers, which is part of the reason these tiny establishments tend to have queues out the front at meal times.

I’ve waited more than an hour for ramen in Kyoto, and again in Tokyo. But I don’t see these as viral experiences because they’re not driven by social media likes. They’re driven by the knowledge that their product is truly better than everyone else’s in the area.

But all queues are not created equal, which is where our lack of ability to discern truly great from truly desirable comes into play.

Bar Nestor is a really good bar. I’ve always loved it. But there are 20 better places to get a steak in San Sebastian, and as many bars just in the Old Town that will provide an experience as enjoyable.

Antonio Bar’s tortilla is also excellent, but it’s not 45-minutes-in-a-queue excellent. Not when there are so many more great tortillas in San Sebastian that just don’t happen to have been featured in a Mark Wiens video.

Good travel sense isn’t about avoiding queues altogether. It’s figuring out why you want to go here, why you want to see this thing, and whether that desire is legitimate. Is this restaurant or this viewpoint really worth giving up a massive chunk of your day to experience? Or do you just want the photo to show you did it?