Evaluating the Use of Digital Cartography to Showcase the Intangible Heritage: The Case of Literary Tourism

Introduction

New narratives and attractions are essential for encouraging the redistribution of tourists and thus ensuring competitive and sustainable tourism. Following the official recognition of intangible cultural heritage and cultural expressions by UNESCO (2005; 2018), many tourism promoters have taken advantage of intangible culture to create new products and attractions. Moreover, expressions of popular culture that are clearly linked to a tourist destination play an important role in shaping its image (Marine-Roig, 2015). This is because fictional narratives transmitted through television, literature, cinema, or online audiovisual platforms reach a large percentage of the population. The shared consumption of these cultural expressions generates a shared imaginary that affects the desires, conceptions, and expectations of potential visitors who have the book or film in mind when they visit (Iwashita, 2006).

This phenomenon is crucial for promoting destinations while it raises both challenges and opportunities for destination management and visitor experience since the perspective prompted by literature or cinema superimposes a new layer of significance on the landscape and the tourist resources of the destination. New foci are generated that are both embraced by local residents (Parramon & Medina, 2017) and lead to the creation of new cultural tourism products. The promotion of fiction-based tourism is thus essential for diversifying existing opportunities for tourism and adding new features to the image of destinations (Arcos-Pumarola et al., 2018). New cultural itineraries that provide a response to new tourist motivations and are communicated via maps may thus appear that provide alternatives to those contained in traditional tourist guides. Media tourism (McClinchey, 2015; van Es & Reijnders, 2018), which includes literary tourism, cinematographic tourism or, even emerging types such as video game tourism (Dubois & Gibbs, 2018), is a type of tourism that is undertaken in order to visit spaces linked to fictional narratives, their authors, or the characters that appear in them.

However, in order to exploit attractions connected to popular culture it is necessary to convert spaces into tourist attractions, spaces that, in many cases, are not immediately visible to the tourist, either because they have no obvious marker (MacCannell, 2003) or because they have been camouflaged in the original story and may therefore have a different appearance. This difficulty means that, in many cases, potential tourist attractions derived from fiction are absent from standard processes of iconization and spectacularization in urban destinations (Quaglieri Domínguez & Paolo Russo, 2010). Nevertheless, this also means that tourism products based on cultural expressions such as literature, cinema or television series may offer heritage-friendly experiences as they are based on the proactive interest of visitors seeking to visit spaces linked to their cultural interests. As Ashworth (2009) has asserted, tourists’ previous interest in and knowledge of a specific heritage site produces tourism that is unlike some criticized and more stereotypical forms of cultural tourism.

This chapter focuses on literary tourism, a specific type of tourism linked to cultural expressions that can be defined as a visit to a location prompted by its links to a literary author or a literary work (Hoppen et al., 2014). This kind of tourism presents a difficulty that does not exist in other media tourism because while those who travel to see film locations, for example, can visit places originally seen on the big (and small) screen, literary tourists start with the idea of the locations they have gained from the written word and, therefore, have a greater need for tools to identify and interpret the places they wish to visit. Beeton (2005) has asserted that cinematographic tourism is an amplifier of literary tourism, since it makes it possible to reach a wider public, but not all literary works benefit from an audiovisual version that situates the works in a recognizable location, while it should not be forgotten that the role of the author in literary tourism is also crucial. In order to exploit the full potential for literary tourism, it is thus necessary to develop strategies and tools to facilitate literary tourists’ visits to key sites.