Narratives and institutional actions like those surrounding the burning of emblematic religious, national, and global tourism infrastructures such as the Notre-Dame cathedral are mediated by historically and geographically informed power relations. An investigation into tourism infrastructures and the discourses, representations, and affects that constitute them reveals the geographically uneven socioeconomic terrain upon which cities, buildings, symbols, and affects are made meaningful and circulate; it also underscores how global tourism reifies differences between the Global North and Global South, rich and poor, and culture and nature. A quick glance at the geography of UNESCO-designated world heritage sites reveals just such distinctions. The formation of tourism’s narratives is contingent on myriad power relations that are historically and geographically mediated. Tourism narratives intersect with tourism infrastructures in ways that are subject to symbolic and affective transformation and contestation. In exceptional circumstances, tourism sites such as island archipelagos (see Mimi Sheller, this volume) might become geopolitical experiments of alternative political action. Yet, more often than not, in the aftermath of destruction and crisis, when the window opens for the expression of alternative narratives, hegemonic discourses are reconsolidated in ways that stabilize existing structures of power and geopolitical orders.