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What is Heritage (Historical) Tourism?

What is Heritage tourism?

Countries famous for historical tourism.

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Advisory Council on Historic Preservation

Each year, millions of travelers visit America’s historic places. The National Trust for Historic Preservation defines heritage tourism as “traveling to experience the places, artifacts, and activities that authentically represent the stories and people of the past and present.”  A high percentage of domestic and international travelers participate in cultural and/or heritage activities while traveling, and those that do stay longer, spend more, and travel more often. Heritage tourism creates jobs and business opportunities, helps protect resources, and often improves the quality of life for local residents.

The ACHP has encouraged national travel and tourism policies that promote the international marketing of America’s historic sites as tourism destinations. The ACHP also engages in ongoing efforts to build a more inclusive preservation program, reaching out to diverse communities and groups and engaging them in dialogue about what parts of our national legacy should be more fully recognized, preserved, and shared. 

The ACHP developed Preserve America , a national initiative to encourage and support community efforts for the preservation and enjoyment of America’s cultural and natural heritage. In partnership with other federal agencies, the initiative has encouraged the use of historic assets for economic development and community revitalization, as well as enabling people to experience and appreciate local historic resources through heritage tourism and education programs. These goals have been advanced by an Executive Order directing federal agencies to support such efforts, a community designation program, and a recognition program for outstanding stewardship of historic resources by volunteers.

From 2004-2016, over 900 Preserve America Communities   were designated in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and two territories, as well as nearly 60 Preserve America Stewards . Many Preserve America Communities are featured in “Discover Our Shared Heritage” National Register on-line travel itineraries . From 2006 through 2010, the National Park Service (in partnership with the ACHP) awarded more than $21 million in Preserve America Grants   to support sustainable historic resource management strategies, with a focus on heritage tourism. 

These links are being provided as a convenience and for informational purposes only; if they are not ACHP links, they do not constitute an endorsement or an approval by the ACHP of any of the products, services or opinions of the corporation or organization or individual. The ACHP bears no responsibility for the accuracy, legality, or content of the external site or for that of subsequent links. Please contact the external site for answers to questions regarding its content, including its privacy policies.

Related resources.

Historical travel

• 1 Understand
• 2.2 Antarctica
• 2.3.1 Across Asia
• 2.3.2 Middle East
• 2.3.3 East and Central Asia
• 2.3.4 South and Southeast Asia
• 2.4.1 Pan-European
• 2.4.2 Central and Eastern Europe
• 2.4.3 Nordic countries
• 2.4.4 Northwestern Europe
• 2.4.5 Southern Europe
• 2.5 Oceania
• 2.6.1 Mexico history series
• 2.6.2 United States history series
• 2.7 South America
• 3.1 The great epics
• 3.2 Espionage history
• 3.3 Science and technology tourism
• 3.4 History of justice
• 3.5 Military tourism
• 3.6 Exploration
• 3.7 Philosophy tourism
• 3.8 Political history

Historical travel includes various kinds of destinations, from Stone Age cave paintings to Cold War installations of the late 20th century. History is a central focus for some travellers and some destinations, and almost every traveller in most places will at least have a look at some old buildings or the local museums .

The early history of life on Earth is studied in paleontology , mainly through fossils. The earliest known fossils of the genus Homo date back at least 4.4 million years. Our species, Homo sapiens , is thought to have evolved between one and two hundred thousand years ago. Some homo sapiens migrated from Africa to the Middle East about 100,000 years ago and to Europe about 60,000 years ago. For purposes of this article, anything after 50,000 BCE counts as history. Naturally this overlaps considerably with our archaeology article.

The boundary between paleontology and archaeology , which deals mainly with the study of ancient human artifacts, is not at all well-defined. The oldest known tools made by hominids — Oldowan stone tools excavated in the Olduvai Gorge of Tanzania — are about 2.6 million years old. Australopithecines, of the genus which included direct ancestors of Homo , had cruder stone tools starting at least 3.3 million years ago. Controlled use of fire is apparently at least a million years old.

The boundary between prehistory and history is commonly drawn at the first local written records, which date back to around 3,000 BCE in Ancient Egypt and Ancient Mesopotamia , but as recently as the 19th century in some other parts of the world. Widespread literacy was rare in most of history and even when commoners could read and write, they often had no or limited access to durable material on which to write. As such, the written record is often focused on what the ruling elites deemed noteworthy and what can be learned about the everyday lives of common people is often only revealed indirectly or through archeology. "Oral history" or what was transmitted from generation to generation through poems, songs, legends and other means of storytelling was often dismissed by "Western" historiography but is now seen as a vital source of historical information instead of or in addition to the written record.

The distinction of history and pre-history by the availability of writing alone is not unanimously accepted and other markers are used as well. Pottery, the wheel, the first domesticated animals (dogs), and the first evidence of crop cultivation all appeared between 30,000 and 20,000 BCE. A number of other important developments took place between about 12,000 BCE and 3,000 — the Neolithic revolution transformed some societies from purely hunting/gathering to being based on agriculture, irrigation, cities, metalworking, and domestication of many more animals. During the civilizations of Greece and Rome , historians demonstrated their interest in history with contributions such as the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World , a list of important works of art and architecture in the region.

The line between "historical" and "modern" is arbitrary; some draw it around the time of the European Renaissance or slightly later with the great voyages of discovery starting with Columbus and Vasco da Gama . For the purposes of a travel guide, it can be convenient to draw it at the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, when cities, industries and railroads began to expand fast, displacing older structures and rural folk culture. Surviving settlements and city districts from before the mid-19th century which were designed before and survived the advent of cars and trains, referred to as old towns , are typically smaller and more compact (and thus walkable) than modern cities. However, during the 19th and 20th centuries, older styles of art , architecture and furnishing were revived and reproduced, so that many buildings that look ancient might be less than 100 years old. There might even be a neo- Gothic train station or an Ancient Greek-style building in the Americas.

Deserted settlements can be archaeological sites or ghost towns . Pioneer villages can be authentic or artificial. In some places you quite literally trip over historical remnants, whereas other historic sites have been painstakingly preserved and restored. While the latter is usually more interesting it may seem "fake", "sterile" or even "artificial" when done badly. Also — with few exceptions — there are fewer lines (if any) for historical places that people actually still live in (like old towns ) or use for their original purpose (like many churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples) than for museums or "theme parks".

Nostalgia tourism aims at recent history, remembered by people alive today (especially the middle-aged and elderly ). As of the 2020s, it includes World War II , as well as postwar United States , Cold War Europe and the Soviet Union .

Some historical sites are threatened, either for natural causes or human-influenced ones like war or neglect. As of the 2020s, coastal cities such as Venice and New Orleans are sinking into the sea, ancient ruins in Iraq and Syria were damaged by wars of the 21st century, and many indigenous cultures around the world have only a handful of survivors left. Future generations are very unlikely to experience these places as they are today, as they will change even if they survive. Responsible travel can provide incentives to save them, or at least their memory.

Continents and regions

Africa is the wellspring of the human race and therefore the site of the oldest finds of human remains, in locations ranging from South Africa to Ethiopia . See paleontology .

Africa was also home to some of the world's oldest civilizations, particularly Ancient Egypt but also Nubia and Ethiopia ; see Ancient African nations for an overview. A bit later in antiquity, Carthage dominated much of North Africa and was then conquered by the Romans , who did major construction projects in their African provinces as they did in all other parts of their empire, leaving behind substantial ruins. In addition, there were great empires in both the Sahel and Southern Africa in the centuries before European colonialism; some of these relics have been vandalized by Salafist extremists in the 21st century, such as those in northern Mali , but a lot is still standing. Perhaps the two most prominent pre-colonial sites in sub-Saharan Africa are Timbuktu in Mali and the Great Zimbabwe in Zimbabwe .

Arab and Berber/Moorish civilization also has left deep and lasting marks on North Africa, and the Arabs, especially the Sultanate of Oman , had far-flung tributary states down the East African coast, also known as the Swahili Coast , notably including Zanzibar , Kilwa Kisiwani and Mombasa . There are also many relics of European colonialism, including slave forts and other forts on the coasts. Locations associated with the trans-Atlantic slave trade , World War II battles , the fights for independence, and the fight against Apartheid in South Africa can also be visited; see 20th-century South Africa for the latter.

• Ancient African nations
• Ancient Egypt
• Churches in Ethiopia
• Great Zimbabwe
• Atlantic slave trade
• World War II in Africa
• 20th-century South Africa
• MV Liemba , built for the Imperial German Navy before World War I, and still in service as a ferry
• Workers’ Assembly Halls

The only unsettled continent has very few traces of human history. Some Antarctic islands, such as the South Georgia Island and South Shetland Islands , have remnants of the whaling industry. The remains of expeditions of the "heroic age" of Antarctic exploration can still be seen and some have been actively preserved or relocated to museums in Europe and elsewhere. Many former research stations have been abandoned to be "swallowed" by snow and ice, and there aren't always many traces visible.

Asia had some of the world's oldest civilizations, including those in Ancient Mesopotamia , the Indus Valley , Persia , Anatolia , Syria , Phoenicia , Israel , the Edomites and Moabites of Jordan , China , India and Java , to name a few. The Middle East contains the world's first cities; some old towns have been inhabited for three millennia or more. The Holy Land is sacred to Judaism , Christianity , Islam and the Baháʼí Faith .

Iran has one of the oldest histories on earth. You may have heard names of emperors like Cyrus the Great or Ardashir I. The Achaemenid Empire was a really big empire which consisted of many states. The Silk Road played a very important role in supporting the economy of empire. The official language of the various Persian empires was usually Persian, but Aramaic and several other languages were also used.

The Asian nation that lacks archaeological relics is much more the exception than the rule. Much has been lost due to iconoclasm, such as in Malaysia several hundreds of years ago, when the relatively new Muslims destroyed Malay Hindu temples; in Saudi Arabia within the last few years, when numerous historical sites were razed in Mecca and other places; in Afghanistan , when statues of the Buddha that were thousands of years old were dynamited by the Taliban; and in Iraq and Syria in the first decade of the 21st century, when the Islamic State group destroyed many of the larger Babylonian and other historical relics they could get their hands on and spirited many of the smaller relics out of the country to sell on the black market.

Across Asia

• Silk Road , an ancient trading route that provided cultural and technology interchange between the East and West from the 2nd century BCE
• On the trail of Marco Polo , who traveled from Venice to China in the 13th century
• Voyages of Ibn Battuta , a 14th-century Muslim who travelled widely in Asia and Africa
• Istanbul to New Delhi overland , the "Hippie Trail" of the 1960s and 70s. Parts of what was the usual route back in the day have become too dangerous, but the journey is still possible using alternative routes.

Middle East

• Fertile Crescent
• Ancient Mesopotamia
• Persian Empire
• Troy , an ancient city famous for the legendary Trojan War recounted in Homer's Iliad
• Pre-Islamic Arabia
• Ancient Israel
• Islamic Golden Age
• Phoenecians

East and Central Asia

• Imperial China — the history of China prior to the establishment of the Republic of China in 1911
• Three Kingdoms — the period that China was tripartite divided into three dynastic states
• Western Xia — a lost ancient Chinese civilization (11th–13th century)
• Mongol Empire (13th–14th century)
• Pre-modern Japan — the history of the Japanese people prior to the Meiji Restoration in 1868
• Pre-modern Korea — the history of the Korean people prior to the Japanese occupation in 1910
• Japanese colonial empire
• Long March — a significant military event during the Chinese civil war in the 1930s that forged the Communist party
• World War II in China — the longest lasting and deadliest front of World War II
• Pacific War — the Second World War in the Asia-Pacific region
• Korean War — the 20th-century conflict at the beginning of the Cold War
• Tibetan Empire — history of the Tibetan people prior to the Qing conquest in the 18th century
• Jomon Prehistoric Sites in Northern Japan‎
• Minority cultures of China
• Indigenous Taiwanese culture
• Minority cultures of Japan

South and Southeast Asia

• Indus Valley Civilisation
• Maurya Empire
• Ahom Kingdom
• Mughal Empire (16th–early 19th century)
• British Raj (1858–1947)
• Khmer Empire
• Philippine Revolution (1896–1898)
• Indochina Wars

Europe has been more thoroughly excavated by archaeologists than any other continent. Southern Europe has archaeological sites from Ancient Greece , the Roman Empire and other ancient civilizations. Central Europe in particular is filled with medieval castles and early-modern palaces, with Old towns across the whole continent. Historical tourism itself has a long history in Europe; educational journeys such as the Grand Tour have been customary since the 17th century.

Europe's heritage has been scarred by war, especially World War II . The Holocaust was not just a genocidal campaign against the Jews; the Nazis also set out to methodically destroy Jewish heritage. Many beautiful synagogues were destroyed and never rebuilt due to — among other things — lack of a Jewish congregation, lack of funds or personal and institutional continuities. Jewish cemeteries, too, were vandalized. As the Second World War left many cities bombed beyond recognition, many city planners saw their opportunity to replace the "old fashioned" old towns with (in today's eyes) bland 1950s architecture and big streets and overpasses to make these places "ready for the automobile". Although the worst excesses have been turned back, many historical buildings that survived the wars were torn down in this somewhat iconoclastic frenzy.

Pan-European

• Prehistoric Europe
• Medieval Europe
• Protestant Reformation
• Napoleonic Wars
• World War I
• D-Day beaches
• Holocaust remembrance
• Cold War Europe

Central and Eastern Europe

• Austro-Hungarian Empire
• German Empire
• Hanseatic League
• Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth
• Russian Empire
• Soviet Union
• Thirty Years' War
• Minority cultures of Russia

Nordic countries

• Danish Empire
• Nobel tourism ; life and works of Alfred Nobel, and the Nobel Prize
• Nordic history (since 1000 CE)
• Stockholm history tour
• Swedish Empire (strictly 1611–1721, the article covers a longer period)
• Vikings and the Old Norse (until 1000 CE)

Northwestern Europe

• Medieval Britain and Ireland
• Early modern Britain and Ireland
• Dutch Empire
• Kingdom of France
• French Colonial Empire
• Industrial Britain
• British Empire

Southern Europe

• Ancient Greece
• Roman Empire
• Byzantine Empire
• Italian Empire
• Medieval and Renaissance Italy
• Al-Andalus , began as an extension of the Islamic Umayyad Caliphate in Iberia
• Armenian Genocide remembrance
• Portuguese Empire
• Spanish Empire

The first humans arrived at New Guinea and Australia 65,000 years ago; this places their indigenous cultures among the oldest known on Earth. Without writing or metalworking, their heritage is sourced from their artwork and oral tradition. See Indigenous Australian culture . The first settlers of the Solomon Islands arrived more than 30,000 years ago. The general term for these ethnic groups is Melanesians .

The rest of Oceania has a relatively short human history, though. The Austronesians began migrating into the Pacific around 3,000 BCE and were the first people to arrive in Polynesia , from 1,000 BCE onwards. They reached Hawaii in the 4th century CE, and New Zealand in the 13th century (see Maori culture ), making the North and South Islands the last major landmasses on Earth to be settled (other than Antarctica). Oceania was also among the last regions to be charted and colonised by Europeans.

• Indigenous Australian culture
• Australian Convict Sites
• Military museums and sites in Australia
• Ned Kelly tourism
• Pacific War

North America

North American prehistory has left behind sites such as the New Mexico Pueblos and Ohio prehistoric sites . In addition, in Mexico and Central America , especially Guatemala , there are very impressive remains of the Mayan civilization , particularly quite a number of pyramids. Civilizations even older than the Maya are studied throughout Mexico, with cave drawing sites and places where civilization advancements such as the development of agriculture or writing systems happened independent of similar advancements in other parts of the world.

Sites associated with written history for the most part begin with early contact between the indigenous peoples of North America and European colonists. Often the indigenous were displaced by European settlers and sometimes killed (for example, the infamous Trail of Tears ). Even when they were not deliberately killed, the settlers frequently decimated indigenous populations by introducing European diseases.

Early colonial sites are often preserved as " old towns " in Atlantic coastal cities such as Quebec City , Havana , San Juan , or St. Augustine . But there are also old cities inland, such as Santa Fe, New Mexico , Guanajuato and Granada (Nicaragua) .

Early settlements that did not develop into major cities are often preserved (or reconstructed) as outdoor museums or " pioneer villages" , like Louisbourg , Plymouth (Massachusetts) , and Williamsburg .

The economic development of the American continent can be experienced by visiting historic plantations in the southern United States, haciendas in Mexico , and historic railroads.

Military tourism on this continent includes the American Revolution , War of 1812 , the Mexican War of Independence , the American Civil War , the Mexican Revolution and the various "Indian Wars" between the colonists and the indigenous peoples.

African-American history includes sites related to the Atlantic slave trade as well as the Underground Railroad : multiple routes for smuggling slaves who had escaped the southern US across the northern states into what later became Canada (at the time British North America) or other non-US territory. Active primarily in the 1850s, when US federal law left slaves who had escaped to free states in immediate danger of recapture by slave catchers unless they left the US entirely.

History-focused itineraries include the Camino Real , the Royal Road linking the 21 Spanish missions of California and the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro , the Royal Road that enabled economic development of New Spain in northwestern Mexico and the southwestern United States; the Lewis and Clark Trail leading across the Western United States, following the route of explorers Lewis and Clark; the Oregon Trail which took settlers to the Pacific coast; the Ruta del Tránsito , the historic route from east to west across North America that passed through Nicaragua ; Route 66 , which existed from 1926-1985 but continues to be marketed for nostalgia tourism; and the American Industry Tour from 17th-century Massachusetts to 20th-century Chicago.

For the politically-inclined there is also the chance to see sites related to the Presidents of the United States .

Mexico history series

Some of these topics overlap a bit with articles in other countries, especially those related to indigenous cultures, which share some stories with Canada , the United States , and Central America (especially Guatemala ). Events during Mexico's Colonial era and the War of Independence often hinge on events in Spain and its empire .

• Indigenous cultures of North America
• Indigenous cultures of Mesoamerica
• Maya civilization
• Colonial Mexico (1492 to 1810)
• Mexican War of Independence (1810-1821)
• Post-Independence Mexico (1821-1910)
• Mexican Revolution (1910-1920)
• Modern Mexico (1920 to today)

United States history series

Note that most of these topics are not exclusive to the United States. Indigenous cultures did not conform to modern boundaries and thus many were equally present in Canada and Mexico. Colonial boundaries were also different to modern ones: British colonial history includes Bermuda and Nova Scotia as much as the "13 colonies" of U.S. school textbooks while the Spanish Empire included all of the southwestern United States. The American War of Independence was partially fought in present-day Canada. Even after the establishment of the modern boundaries, trends and events touched multiple countries; those interested in the Old West will also find cowboy culture in Northern Mexico and the Canadian Prairies .

• New France (1608 to 1763)
• Early United States history (1492 to 1861)
• American Civil War (1861 to 1865)
• Old West (mainly 1865 to 1900)
• Industrialization of the United States (1865 to 1945)
• Postwar United States (1945 to present day)

South America

Many people travel to Peru every year to see the Inca Trail and other historical sites from the Inca Empire. Other historical sites include the remnants of the Falklands War and the history of the Jesuit missions in Paraguay . Beautiful colonial old towns can be found all over the continent, especially in Argentina and Chile , whose mineral wealth made them some of the richest countries in the world during the early 20th century.

• Indigenous cultures of South America

The great epics

Some of the oldest and most famous works of literature are epic poems about great heroes. In all cases there is some dispute among scholars about the historical authenticity of these stories, and about the dates of both the events described and the composition of the text.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest known piece of literature. It tells tales of a Sumerian king who probably ruled in the first half of the 3rd millennium BCE and of a great flood. The best-known version was likely written around 1200 BCE. While a surprising number of copies survive for a text of that age, they are not all written in the same language and sometimes disagree significantly on details.

Other great epics were written a few hundred years BCE and describe events around 1000 BCE:

• Homer recounts the story of the Trojan War in two epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey . In Roman times Virgil's Aeneid continues the story, following a warrior from Troy to Italy. Today Troy is an archaeological site which attracts tourists.
• The Mahabarata is a great Indian epic. Perhaps the most famous passage in India literature is the Baghavad Gita , a dialog between the warrior Arjuna and the God Krishna which takes place just before the climactic battle. That battle was fought at Kurukshetra , which now attracts both pilgrims and tourists.
• The Ramayana is another great Indian epic. An epic battle was fought between the forces of the hero, Rama, and the villain, Ravana, on the island of Lanka, which is widely believed to be modern-day Sri Lanka . There is a chain of islands stretching from modern-day India to Sri Lanka, which is believed by Hindus to be the remains of the land bridge to Lanka that Rama and his army built.
• The Shahnameh is Iran 's national epic, written in the late 10th and early 11th centuries by the poet Ferdowsi. It recounts the mythical origins and history of the Persian Empire up until the Muslim conquest in the 7th century. Besides Iran, it is also highly revered in the neighboring countries that were historically influenced by Persia, such as Afghanistan , Tajikistan , and Azerbaijan .
• The Crusades have inspired much epic poetry in medieval Europe . Perhaps the most famous among them is the French poem La Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland), composed in the 11th century, possibly by a Norman poet called Turold. Other notable ones include the 16th century Italian poems La Gerusalemme Liberata by Torquato Tasso and Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto, the latter of which inspired numerous operas over the years.
• The Bible is a more complex set of books than can be encompassed by the term "epic", but parts of it are basically Hebrew epics. The Torah (Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses) was first written down in full in the 6th century BCE, with fragments having been found that date to the 7th century BCE. The Exodus of Moses is one of the most famous stories of the Old Testament. See Holy Land , Judaism and Christianity for Biblical destinations.

Various Norse Sagas and Eddas probably originated as oral tradition around 1000 CE and were written down a few centuries later. Other Europeans also had epics, such as the Old English Beowulf or the Middle High German Nibelungenlied .

When reading any epic, keep in mind that most were passed down orally for centuries before being written down. Also, many tended to exaggerate numbers, either just to make a better story or to make rulers look impressive with great army sizes, harem sizes and feats of city building, so the "real deal" when finally verified by archeologists can fall short of the epic scales of the tales.

The equivalent in Chinese historiography is known as the Twenty-Four Histories (二十四史), starting with the compilation of the Records of the Grand Historian (史記/史记) by the Han Dynasty historian Sima Qian in the 1st century BCE. Subsequent official histories were typically compiled by the succeeding dynasty about the dynasty that preceded them. The official history of the Qing Dynasty has yet to be compiled; the Chinese government is attempting to compile it, but progress has been slow.

Espionage history

Espionage has existed since ancient times, and sometimes made or broken the fate of nations.

Science and technology tourism

Science tourism is for those with an interest in science, including science museums as well as live science research centers and exploratory missions. Closely related is industrial tourism , factory tours and museums describing manufacturing in various time periods from the start of the Industrial Revolution to the modern era.

Industrial tourism includes visits to historical or present-day industrial sites and museums. Mining tourism and certain underground works are a subset of industrial tourism. It is often related to the history of transportation, with maritime history , steam power , heritage railways , automotive history , aviation history and space flight sites .

History of organized labor describes the first trade unions and their struggle to improve working conditions.

Nuclear tourism is for those with an interest in the nuclear industry from either a science or military perspective. The locations can either contain live reactors or be otherwise of interest from a historical point of view; see Golden Age of Modern Physics for the preceding research in the first half of the 20th century.

Mathematics tourism includes places which inspired the understanding of numbers, geometry, and mathematical structure.

History of justice

Judicial tourism includes visits to courthouses, police buildings, prisons, crime scenes, and other places related to the legal system.

Military tourism

Military tourism is for those with an interest in current or historical military sites and facilities, including museums, battlefields, cemeteries and technology.

Exploration

Retracing the voyages of the great explorers of old:

• On the trail of Marco Polo
• Voyages of Zheng He
• Voyages of Ibn Battuta

Many famous journeys are from Europe's Age of Discovery :

• Magellan-Elcano circumnavigation
• Voyages of Columbus
• Voyages of James Cook
• Voyages of George Vancouver
• Voyages of Matthew Flinders

Later European explorers:

• Voyages of John Franklin
• Voyages of Roald Amundsen

Philosophy tourism

Philosophy tourism is for those with an interest in the history of philosophy, including historical residences of philosophers, museums, statues and places of burial.

Political history

Monarchies , grand houses , legislative buildings , local governments , history of organized labour and United Nations are some themes for the history of government and politics.

• Archaeological sites
• Grand houses
• Grand old hotels
• Fiction tourism and Literary travel
• Heritage railways
• Legacy food markets and Legacy retailers
• Mining tourism
• National parks
• Official residences
• Old towns and Ghost towns
• Some Tourist trains also focus on a supposed or actual historical connection
• Reenactment and LARP
• Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
• UNESCO Creative Cities
• UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage
• UNESCO World Heritage List

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• Topic articles
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Heritage Tourism

The late Alan Gordon was professor of history at the University of Guelph. He authored three books: Making Public Pasts: The Contested Terrain of Montreal’s Public Memories, 1891–1930, The Hero and the Historians: Historiography and the Uses of Jacques Cartier and Time Travel: Tourism and the Rise of the Living History Museum in Mid-Twentieth Century Canada.

• Published: 18 August 2022
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Heritage tourism is a form of cultural tourism in which people travel to experience places, artifacts, or activities that are believed to be authentic representations of people and stories from the past. It couples heritage, a way of imagining the past in terms that suit the values of the present, with travel to locations associated with enshrined heritage values. Heritage tourism sites are normally divided into two often overlapping categories: natural sites and sites related to human culture and history. By exploring the construction of heritage tourism destinations in historical context, we can better understand how and through what attributes places become designated as sites of heritage and what it means to have an authentic heritage experience. These questions are explored through heritage landscapes, national parks, battlefield tourism, architectural tourism, and the concept of world heritage.

Heritage is one of the most difficult, complex, and expansive words in the English language because there is no simple or unanimously accepted understanding of what heritage encompasses. 1 We can pair heritage with a vast range of adjectives, such as cultural, historical, physical, architectural, or natural. What unites these different uses of the term is their reference to the past, in some way or another, while linking it to present-day needs. Heritage, then, is a reimagining of the past in terms that suit the values of the present. It cannot exist independently of human attempts to make the past usable because it is the product of human interpretation of not only the past, but of who belongs to particular historical narratives. At its base, heritage is about identity, and the inclusion and exclusion of peoples, stories, places, and activities in those identities. The use of the word “heritage” in this context is a postwar phenomenon. Heritage and heritage tourism, although not described in these terms, has a history as long as the history of modern tourism. Indeed, a present-minded use of the past is as old as civilization itself, and naturally embedded itself in the development of modern tourism. 2 The exploration of that history, examining the origins and development of heritage tourism, helps unpack some of the controversies and dissonance it produces.

Heritage in Tourism

Heritage tourism sites are normally divided into two categories: natural sites and sites of human, historical, or cultural heritage. the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) separates its list of world heritage sites in this manner. Sites of natural heritage are understood to be places where natural phenomena such as wildlife, flora, geological features, or ecosystems, are generally deemed to be of exceptional beauty or significance. Cultural heritage sites, which represent over three quarters of UNESCO-recognized sites, are places where human activity has left a lasting and substantial physical impact that reveals important features of a culture or cultures. Despite the apparent simplicity of this division, it is not always easy to categorize individual sites. UNESCO thus allows for a category of “mixed” heritage sites. But official recognition is not necessary to mark a place as a heritage destination and, moreover, some authors point to versions of heritage tourism that are not tightly place-specific, such as festivals of traditional performances or foodways. 3

The central questions at the heart of heritage tourism ask what it is that designates something as “heritage” and whether tourists have an “authentic” heritage experience there. At its simplest, heritage tourism is a form of cultural tourism in which people travel to experience places, artifacts, or activities that are authentic representations of people and stories from the past. Yet this definition encompasses two, often competing, motivations. Heritage tourism is both a cultural phenomenon through which people attempt to connect with the past, their ancestors, and their identity, and it is an industry designed to profit from it. Another question surrounds the source of the “heritage” in heritage tourism. Many scholars have argued that heritage does not live in the destinations or attractions people seek. Heritage is not innate to the destination, but is rather based on the tourist’s motivations and expectations. Thus, heritage tourism is a form of tourism in which the main motivation for visiting a site is based on the traveler’s perceptions of its heritage characteristics. Following the logic of this view, the authenticity of the heritage experience depends on the traveler rather than the destination or the activity. Heritage features, as well as the sense of authenticity they impart, are democratized in what might be called a consumer-based model of authenticity. 4 This is a model that allows for virtually anything or any place to be a heritage destination. Although such an approach to understanding heritage tourism may well serve present-day studies, measuring motivations is more complicated for historical subjects. Long-departed travelers are not readily surveyed about their expectations; motivations have to be teased out of historical records. In a contrasting view, John Tunbridge and Gregory Ashworth argue that heritage attractions are created through marketing: they are invented to be heritage attractions and sold to a traveling public as such. Yet, heritage attractions, in this understanding, are still deemed authentic when they satisfy consumer expectations about heritage. 5 This insight also implies that heritage tourism destinations might be deceptions, and certainly there are examples of the fabrication of heritage sites. However, if motivations and expectations are arbiters of heritage, then even invented heritage can become authentic through its acceptance by a public. While not ignoring the motivations and expectations of travelers, for historians, any understanding of heritage tourism must include the process by which sites become designated as a places of heritage. It must encompass the economic aspects of tourism development, tourism’s role in constructing narratives of national or group identity, and the cultural phenomenon of seeking authentic representations of those identities, regardless of their origins. Such a practice might include traveling to sites connected to diasporas, places of historical significance, sites of religious pilgrimages, and landscapes of scenic beauty or cultural importance.

Scholarly interest in heritage, at least in the English-speaking world, dates from the 1980s reaction to the emergence of new right-wing political movements that used the past as a tool to legitimize political positions. Authors such as David Lowenthal, Robert Hewison, and Patrick Wright bemoaned the recourse to “heritage” as evidence of a failing society that was backward-looking, fearful, and resentful of modern diversity. 6 Heritage, they proclaimed, was elitist and innately conservative, imposed on the people from above in ways that distanced them from an authentic historical consciousness. Although Raphael Samuel fired back that the critique of heritage was itself elitist and almost snobbish, this line continued in the 1990s. Works by John Gillis, Tony Bennett, and Eric Hobsbawm, among others, concurred that heritage was little more than simplified history used as a weapon of social and political control.

At about the same time, historians also began to take tourism seriously as a subject of inquiry, and they quickly connected leisure travel to perceived evils in the heritage industry. Historians such as John K. Walton in the United Kingdom and John Jakle in the United States began investigating patterns of tourism’s history in their respective countries. Although not explicitly concerned with heritage tourism, works such as Jakle’s The Tourist explored the infrastructure and experience of leisure travel in America, including the different types of attractions people sought. 7 In Sacred Places , John Sears argued that tourism helped define America in the nineteenth century through its landscape and natural wonders. Natural tourist attractions, such as Yosemite and Yellowstone parks became sacred places for a young nation without unifying religious and national shrines. 8 Among North America’s first heritage destinations was Niagara Falls, which drew Americans, Europeans, Britons, and Canadians to marvel at its beauty and power. Tourist services quickly developed there to accommodate travelers and, as Patricia Jasen and others note, Niagara became a North American heritage destination at the birth of the continent’s tourism trade. 9

As the European and North American travel business set about establishing scenic landscapes as sites worthy of the expense and difficulty of travel to them, they rarely used a rhetoric of heritage. Sites were depicted as places to embrace “the sublime,” a feeling arising when the emotional experience overwhelms the power of reason to articulate it. Yet as modern tourism developed, promoters required more varied attractions to induce travelers to visit specific destinations. North America’s first tourist circuits, well established by the 1820s, took travelers up the Hudson River valley from New York to the spas of Saratoga Springs, then utilizing the Erie Canal even before its completion, west to Niagara Falls. Tourist guidebooks were replete with vivid depictions of the natural wonders to be witnessed, and very quickly Niagara became heavily commercialized. As America expanded beyond the Midwest in the second half of the nineteenth century, text and image combined to produce a sense that these beautiful landscapes were a common inheritance of the (white and middle-class) American people. Commissioned expeditions, such as the Powell Expedition of 1869–1872, produced best-selling travel narratives revealing the American landscape to enthralled readers in the eastern cities (see Butler , this volume). John Wesley Powell’s description of his voyage along the Colorado River combined over 450 pages of written description with 80 prints, mostly portraying spectacular natural features. American westward exploration, then, construed the continent’s natural wonders as its heritage.

In America, heritage landscapes often obscured human activity and imagined the continent as nature untouched. But natural heritage also played a role in early heritage tourism in Britain and Europe. Many scholars have investigated the connection between national character and the depiction of topographical features, arguing that people often implant their communities with ideas of landscape and associate geographical features with their identities. In this way, landscape helps embed a connection between places and particular local and ethnic identities. 10 Idealized landscapes become markers of national identity (see Noack , this volume). For instance, in the Romantic era, the English Lake District and the mountains of the Scottish Highlands became iconic national representations of English, Scottish, or British nationalities. David Lowenthal has commented on the nostalgia inherent in “landscape-as-heritage.” The archetypical English landscape, a patchwork of fields divided by hedgerows and sprinkled with villages, was a relatively recent construction when the pre-Raphaelite painters reconfigured it as the romantic allure of a medieval England. It spoke to the stability and order inherent in English character. 11

Travel literature combined with landscape art to develop heritage landscapes and promote them as tourist attractions. Following the 1707 Act of Union, English tourists became fascinated with Scotland, and in particular the Scottish Highlands. Tourist guidebooks portrayed the Highlands as a harsh, bleak environment spectacular for its beauty as well as the quaintness of its people and their customs (see Schaff , this volume). Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tourist texts cemented the image of Highland culture and heritage. Scholars have criticized this process as a “Tartanization” or “Balmoralization” of the country by which its landscape and culture was reduced to a few stereotypes appealing to foreign visitors. Nevertheless, guidebook texts described the bens, lochs, and glens with detail, helping create and reinforce a mental picture of a quintessential Highland landscape. 12 The massacre of members of the Clan MacDonald at Glencoe, killed on a winter night in 1692 for insufficient loyalty to the monarchy, added romance. Forgotten for over a century, the event was recalled in the mid-nineteenth century by the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, and quickly became a tragic tale associated with the scenic valley. At the same time the Highlands were being re-coded from a dangerous to a sublime landscape, its inhabitants became romanticized as an untainted, simple, premodern culture. The natural beauty of the landscape at Glencoe and its relative ease of access, being close to Loch Lomond and Glasgow, made it an attraction with a ready-made tragic tale. Highlands travel guides began to include Glencoe in their itineraries, combining a site of natural beauty with a haunting human past. Both natural and cultural heritage, then, are not inherent, but represent choices made by people about what and how to value the land and the past. On France’s Celtic fringe, a similar process unfolded. When modern tourism developed in Brittany in the mid-nineteenth century, guidebooks such as Joanne’s defined the terms of an authentic Breton experience. Joanne’s 1867 guide coupled the region’s characteristic rugged coastlines with the supposedly backward people, their costumes, habitudes, beliefs, and superstitions, who inhabited it. 13 Travel guides were thus the first contributors in the construction of heritage destinations. They began to highlight the history, real and imagined, of destinations to promote their distinctions. And, with increasing interest in the sites of national heritage, people organized to catalog, preserve, and promote heritage destinations.

Organizing Heritage Tourism

Among the world’s first bodies dedicated to preserving heritage was the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), organized in England in 1877. Emerging as a result of particular debates about architectural practices, this society opposed a then-popular trend of altering buildings to produce imaginary historical forms. This approach, which was most famously connected to Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc’s French restorations, involved removing or replacing existing architectural features, something renounced by the SPAB. The society’s manifesto declared that old structures should be repaired so that their entire history would be protected as part of cultural heritage. The first heritage preservation legislation, England’s Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1882, provided for the protection initially of 68 prehistoric sites and appointed an inspector of ancient monuments. 14 By 1895, movements to conserve historic structures and landscapes had combined with the founding of the National Trust, officially known as the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty, as a charitable agency. Much of the Trust’s early effort protected landscapes: of twenty-nine properties listed in 1907, seventeen were acreages of land and other open spaces. 15 Over the twentieth century, however, the Trust grew more and more concerned with protecting country houses and gardens, which now constitute the majority of its listed properties.

British efforts were duplicated in Europe. The Dutch Society for the Preservation of Natural Landmarks was established in 1904; France passed legislation to protect natural monuments in 1906. And in Sweden, the Society for the Protection of Nature was established in 1909, to name only a few examples. Nature was often connected to the spirit of “the folk,” an idea that encompassed a notion of an original ethnic core to the nation. Various European nationalisms of the period embraced the idea of an “authentic” national folk, with each folk considered unique due to its connection with a specific geography. Folklore and the celebration of folk culture offered Europeans links to imagined national heritages in a rapidly modernizing world, as modern, middle-class Europeans turned their attention to the romanticized primitive life of so-called simple peasants and linked notions of natural and human heritage. Through the concept of the folk, natural and human heritage combined to buttress emerging expressions of nationalism. 16

Sweden provides an instructive example. As early as the seventeenth century, Swedish antiquarians were intrigued by medieval rune stones, burial mounds, and cairns strewn across the country, but also saw these connected to natural features. Investigations of these relics of past Nordic culture involved a sense of the landscape in which they were found. This interest accelerated as folk studies grew in popularity, in part connected to nationalist political ambitions of Swedes during the growing tensions within the Kingdom of Sweden and Norway, which divided in 1905. Sweden’s preservation law required research into the country’s natural resources to create an inventory of places. Of particular interest were features considered to be “nature in its original state.” The intent was to preserve for future generations at least one example of Sweden’s primordial landscape features: primeval forests, swamps, peat bogs, and boulders. But interest was also drawn to natural landmarks associated with historical or mythical events from Sweden’s past. Stones or trees related to tales from the Nordic sagas, for example, combined natural with cultural heritage. 17

Although early efforts to protect heritage sites were not intended to support tourism, the industry quickly benefited. Alongside expanding tours to the Scottish Highlands and English Lake District, European landscapes became associated with leisure travel. As Tait Kellar argues for one example, the context of the landscape is crucial in understanding the role of tourism in the German Alps. 18 Guidebooks of the nineteenth and early twentieth century did not use the term “heritage,” but they described its tenets to audiences employing a different vocabulary. Baedeker’s travel guides, such as The Eastern Alps , guided bourgeois travelers through the hiking trails and vistas of the mountains and foothills, offering enticing descriptions of the pleasures to be found in the German landscape. Beyond the land, The Eastern Alps directed visitors to excursions that revealed features of natural history, human history, and local German cultures. 19

Across the Atlantic people also cherished escapes to the countryside for leisure and recreation and, as economic and population growth increasingly seemed to threaten the idyllic tranquility of scenic places, many banded together to advocate for their conservation. Yet, ironically, by putting in place systems to mark and preserve America’s natural heritage, conservationists popularized protected sites as tourist destinations. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the conservation movement encouraged the US government to set aside massive areas of American land as parks. For example, Europeans first encountered the scenic beauty of California’s Yosemite Valley at midcentury. With increasing settler populations following the California Gold Rush, tourists began arriving in ever larger numbers and promoters began building accommodations and roads to encourage them. Even during the Civil War, the US government recognized the potential for commercial overdevelopment and the desire of many to preserve America’s most scenic places. 20 In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant, designating acres of the valley protected wilderness. This set a precedent for the later creation of America’s first national park. In 1871, the Hayden Geological Survey recommended the preservation of nearly 3,500 square miles of land in the Rocky Mountains, in the territories of Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. Ferdinand V. Hayden was concerned that the pristine mountain region might soon be as overrun with tourists as Niagara Falls had by then become. 21 The following year, Congress established Yellowstone National Park, the world’s first designated “heritage” site. Yet, from the beginning, Yellowstone and subsequent parks were assumed to be tourist attractions. By 1879, tourists to Yellowstone had established over 200 miles of trails that led them to the park’s most famous attractions. Although thought of as nature preserves, parks were often furnished with railway access, and amenities and accommodations appeared, often prior to official designation. National parks were immediately popular tourist attractions. Even before it had established a centralized bureaucracy to care for them, the United States government had established nine national parks and nearly two dozen national monuments. Canada lagged, but established Rocky Mountain National Park (now Banff) in 1885 to balance interests of resource extraction and conservation. (The world’s second national park was Australia’s Royal National Park, established by the colony of New South Wales in 1879.) By the outbreak of the Great War, Canada and the United States had established fifteen national parks, all but one west of the Mississippi River.

Establishing parks was one component of building a heritage tourism infrastructure. Another was the creation of a national bureaucracy to organize it. The Canadian example reveals how heritage and tourism drove the creation of a national parks service. Much of the mythology surrounding Canada’s national parks emphasized the role of nature preservationists, yet the founder of the parks system, J. B. Harkin, was deeply interested in building a parks network for tourists. 22 Indeed, from early in the twentieth century, Canada’s parks system operated on the principle that parks should be “playgrounds, vacation destinations, and roadside attractions that might simultaneously preserve the fading scenic beauty and wildlife populations” of a modernizing nation. 23 Although Canada had established four national parks in the Rocky Mountains in the 1880s, the administration of those parks was haphazard and decentralized. It was not until the approaching third centennial of the founding of Quebec City (now a UNESCO World Heritage Site) that the Canadian government began thinking actively about administering its national heritage. In 1908, Canada hosted an international tourist festival on the Plains of Abraham, the celebrated open land where French and British armies had fought the decisive battle for supremacy in North America in 1759. The event so popularized the fabled battlefield that the government was compelled to create a National Battlefield Commission to safeguard it. This inspired the creation of the Dominion Parks Branch three years later to manage Canada’s natural heritage parks, the world’s first national parks service. By 1919 the system expanded to include human history—or at least European settler history—through the creation of national historic parks. These parks were even more explicitly designed to attract tourists, automobile tourists in particular. In 1916, five years after Canada, the United States established the National Parks Service with similar objectives.

As in Europe, nationalism played a significant role in developing heritage tourism destinations in America. The first national parks were inspired by the series of American surveying expeditions intended to secure knowledge of the landscape for political control. Stephen Pyne connects the American “discovery” of the Grand Canyon, for example, to notions of manifest destiny following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) that ended the Mexican-American War and ceded over 500,000 square miles of what is today the western United States. Popularized by the report of John Wesley Powell (1875) , the canyon began attracting tourists in the 1880s, although Congress failed to establish it as a national park. 24 Tourism was central to developing the Grand Canyon as a national heritage destination. Originally seen by Spanish explorers as an obstacle, and as a sacred place by the Navajo, Hopi, Hualapai, and Havasupai peoples, the canyon came to mark American exceptionalism. Piece by piece, sections of the canyon were set aside as reserves and finally declared a national park in 1919. By then, the park had been serviced by a railway (since 1901) and offered tourists a luxury hotel on the canyon’s south rim.

Archaeology also entered into the construction of American heritage. Almost as soon as it was annexed to the United States, the American southwest revealed to American surveyors a host of archaeological remains. For residents of the southwest, the discovery of these ancient ruins of unknown age pointed to the nobility of a lost predecessor civilization. By deliberately construing the ruins as being of an unknown age, Anglo-American settlers were able to draw distinctions between the ancients and contemporary Native Americans in ways that validated their own occupation of the territory. The ruins also had commercial potential. In Colorado, President Theodore Roosevelt established Mesa Verde National Park in 1906 to protect and capitalize on the abandoned cliff dwellings located there. These ruins had been rediscovered in the 1880s when ranchers learned of them from the local Ute people. By the turn of the century, the ruins had attracted so many treasure seekers that they needed protection. This was the first national park in America designated to protect a site of archaeological significance and linked natural and human heritage in the national parks system. 25

If, as many argue, heritage is not innate, how is it made? Part of the answer to this question can be found in the business of tourism. Commercial exploitation of heritage tourism emerged alongside heritage tourism, but was particularly active in the postwar years. Given their association with tourism, it is not surprising that railways and associated businesses played a prominent role in promoting heritage destinations. Before World War II, the most active heritage tourism promoter was likely the Fred Harvey Company, which successfully marketed, and to a great degree created, much of the heritage of the American southwest. The Fred Harvey Company originated with the opening of a pair of cafés along the Kansas Pacific Railway in 1876. After a stuttering beginning, Harvey’s chain of railway eateries grew in size. Before dining cars became regular features of passenger trains, meals on long-distance trips were provided by outside business such as Harvey’s at regular stops. With the backing of the Santa Fe Railroad, the company also developed attractions based on the Southwest region’s unique architectural and cultural features. The image capitalized on the artistic traditions of Native Americans and early Spanish traditions to create, in particular, the Adobe architectural style now associated with Santa Fe and New Mexico. 26 These designs were also incorporated into tourist facilities on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, including the El Tovar hotel and the Hopi House souvenir and concession complex, designed to resemble a Hopi pueblo.

Relying on existing and manufactured heritage sites, North American railways popularized attractions as heritage sites. The Northern Pacific Railroad financed a number of hotels in Yellowstone Park, including the Old Faithful Inn in 1904. In 1910, the Great Northern Railroad launched its “See America First” campaign to attract visitors (and new investments) to its routes to the west’s national parks. In Canada, the Dominion Atlantic Railway rebuilt Grand Pré, a Nova Scotia Acadian settlement to evoke the home of the likely fictional character Evangeline from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1848 poem by the same name. In the poem, Evangeline was deported from Acadia in 1755 and separated from her betrothed. By the 1920s, the railway was transporting tourists to Grand Pré, christened “Land of Evangeline,” where reproductions stood in for sites mentioned in the poem. 27 However, following World War I, heritage tourism in North America became increasingly dependent on automobile travel and the Dominion Atlantic eventually sold its interest to the Canadian government.

Conflict as Cultural Heritage

Tourism to sites of military history initially involved side trips from more popular, usually natural, attractions. Thomas Chambers notes that the sites of battles of the Seven Years’ War, Revolutionary War, and War of 1812 became tourist attractions as side trips from more established itineraries, such as the northern or fashionable tours. War of 1812 battlefields, many of them in the Niagara theater of the war, were conveniently close to the natural wonders people already came to see. By visiting the places where so many had sacrificed for their country, tourists began attaching new meaning to the sites. Ease of access was essential. Chambers contrasts sites in southern states with those in the north. In the south, the fields of important American Revolution victories at Cowpens and King’s Mountain were too remote to permit easy tourist access and long remained undeveloped. 28 In a contrary example, the Plains of Abraham, the scene of General Wolfe’s dramatic victory over France that led to the Conquest of Canada, was at first a curiosity. The visit to Quebec, a main destination on the northern tour, was originally based on its role as a major port and the attraction of the scenic beauty of the city on the cliffs, compared favorably to Cintra in Portugal. 29 Ease of access helped promoters convert an empty field near the city into the “hallowed Plains.”

Access to battlefields increased at almost the exact moment that one of the nineteenth century’s most devastating wars, the American Civil War, broke out. Railway travel was essential to both the success of the Union Army in reconquering the rebelling Confederacy, and in developing tourism to the sites of the slaughter. Railway travel made sites accessible for urban travelers and new technologies, such as photography and the telegraph, sped news of victories and defeats quickly around the nation. Gettysburg, the scene of a crucial Union victory in July 1863, became a tourist attraction only a few days later. Few would call the farmland of southeastern Pennsylvania sublime, but dramatic human history had unfolded there. The battle inspired the building of a national memorial on the site only four months later, the Soldiers’ National Cemetery. At the inauguration of the cemetery Abraham Lincoln delivered his “Gettysburg Address,” calling on the nation to long remember and cherish the “hallowed ground” where history had been made.

Gettysburg sparked a frenzy of marking sites of Civil War battles and events. Battle sites became important backdrops for political efforts at reunion and reconciliation after the war and attracted hundreds and later thousands of tourists for commemorative events and celebrations. Ten thousand saw President Rutherford Hayes speak at Gettysburg in 1878 and, for the 50th anniversary of Gettysburg, some 55,000 veterans returned to Pennsylvania in July 1913. What had once been a site of bloody, brutal combat had been transformed into a destination where tourists gathered to embrace their shared heritage, north and south. As the years progressed, more attractions were added as tourists began to see their heritage on the battlefield. 30

The conflict that most clearly created tourist attractions out of places of suffering was the World War I. Soon after the war ended, its sites of slaughter also became tourist attractions. As with the Civil War in America, World War I tourists were local people and relatives of the soldiers who had perished on the field of battle. By one estimate 60,000 tourists visited the battlefields of the Western Front by the summer of 1919, the same year that Michelin began publishing guidebooks to them. Numbers grew in the decades following the war. Over 140,000 tourists took in the sites of the war in 1931, which grew to 160,000 for 1939. Organizations such as the Workers’ Travel Association hoped that tourism to battle sites would promote peace, but the travel business also benefited. Travel agencies jumped at the chance to offer tours and publishers produced travel guides to the battlefields. At least thirty English guidebooks were published by 1921. 31

This interest in a conflict that killed, often in brutal fashion, so many might seem a ghoulish form of heritage tourism. Yet Peter Slade argues that people do not visit battlefields for the love for death and gore. They attend these sites out of a sense of pilgrimage to sites sacred to their national heritage. Organized pilgrimages reveal this sense of belonging most clearly. The American Legion organized a pilgrimage of 15,000 veterans in 1927 to commemorate the decade anniversary of America’s entry to the war. The following year 11,000 Britons, including 3,000 women, made a pilgrimage of their own. Canada’s first official pilgrimage involved 8,000 pilgrims (veterans and their families) to attend the inauguration of the Vimy Ridge Memorial, marking a site held by many as a place sacred to Canadian identity. Australians and New Zealanders marched to Gallipoli in Turkey for similar reasons. 32 As with the sites of the Western Front, Gallipoli and pilgrimages to it generated travel accounts and publishers assembled guidebooks to help travelers navigate its attractions and accommodations. In these episodes, tourism was used to construct national heritage. In the interwar years, tourist activity popularized the notion that sites of national heritage existed on the battlefields of foreign lands, where “our” nation’s history was forged. National heritage tourism, then, became transnational.

Since the end of World War II, battlefield tourism has become an important projection of heritage tourism. Commercial tour operators organize thousands of tours of European World War I and World War II battlefields for Americans and Canadians, as for other nationalities. The phenomenon seems particularly pronounced among North Americans. The motivation behind modern battlefield tourism reveals its connection to heritage tourism. If heritage is an appeal to the past that helps establish a sense of identity and belonging, the feelings of national pride and remorse for sacrifice of the fallen at these sites helps define them as sacred to a particular vision of a national past. The sanctity of the battle site makes the act of consuming it as a tourist attraction an act of communion with heritage.

Built Heritage and Tourism

During the upheaval of the Civil War, some Americans began to recognize historic houses as elements of their heritage worthy of preservation. These houses were initially not seen as tourist attractions, but as markers of national values. Their heritage value preceded their value as tourist attractions. The first major preservation initiative launched in 1853 to save George Washington’s tomb and home from spoliation. Behind overt sectional divisions of north and south was an implied vesting of republican purity among the patrician families that could trace their ancestors to the revolutionary age and who could restore American culture to its proper deferential state. The success of preserving Mount Vernon led to a proliferation of similar house museums. By the 1930s, the American museum association even produced a guide for how to establish new examples and promote them as sites of heritage for tourist interest. Historic houses provided tangible, physical evidence of heritage. Like scenic landscapes attached to the stories of history, buildings connected locations to significant events and people of the past. Architectural heritage came to be closely associated with tourism. Architectural monuments are easily identified, easy to promote, and, as physical structures, easily reproduced in souvenir ephemera. Although the recognition of architectural monuments as tourist draws could be said to have originated with the Grand Tour, or at least with the publication of John Ruskin’s “Seven Lamps of Architecture” (1849), which singled out the monuments of Venice for veneration, twentieth century mobility facilitated a greater desire to travel to see historic structures. Indeed, mobility, especially automobility, prompted the desire to preserve or even reinvent the structural heritage of the past.

A driving factor behind the growth of tourism to sites associated with these structural relics was a feeling that the past—and especially the social values of the past—was being lost. For example, Colonial Williamsburg developed in reaction to the pace of urban and social change brought about by automobile travel in the 1920s. Williamsburg was once a community of colonial era architecture, but had become just another highway town before John D. Rockefeller lent his considerable wealth to its preservation and reconstruction. 33 Rockefeller had already donated a million dollars for the restoration of French chateaux at Versailles, Fontainebleu, and Rheims. 34 At Williamsburg, his approach was to remove structures from the post-Colonial period to create a townscape from the late eighteenth century. By selecting a cut-off year of 1790, Rockefeller and his experts attempted to freeze Williamsburg in a particular vision of the past. The heritage envisioned was not that of ordinary Americans, but that of colonial elites. Conceived to be a tourist attraction, Colonial Williamsburg offered a tourist-friendly lesson in American heritage. Rockefeller, and a host of consultants convinced the (white) people of Williamsburg to reimagine their heritage and their past. America’s heritage values were translated to the concepts of self-government and individual liberty elaborated by the great patriots, Washington, Madison, Henry, and Jefferson. The town commemorated the planter elites that had dominated American society until the Jacksonian era, and presented them as progenitors of timeless ideals and values. They represented the “very cradle of that Americanism of which Rockefeller and the corporate elite were the inheritors and custodians.” 35

Rockefeller’s Williamsburg was not the only American heritage tourist reconstruction. Canada also underwent reconstruction projects for specifically heritage tourism purposes, such as the construction of “Champlain’s Habitation” at Port Royal, Nova Scotia or the attempt to draw tourists to Invermere, British Columbia with a replica fur trade fort. 36 Following World War I and accelerating after World War II, the number and nature of places deemed heritage attractions grew. Across North America, all levels of governments and private corporations built replica heritage sites with varying degrees of “authenticity.” Although these sites often made use of existing buildings and landscapes, they also manufactured an imaginary environment of the past. The motivation behind these sites was almost always diversification of the local economy through increased tourism. Canada’s Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site is perhaps the most obvious example. It is a reconstructed section of the French colonial town, conquered and destroyed in 1758, built on the archaeological remains of the original. Constructed by the government of Canada as a means to diversify the failing resource economy of its Atlantic provinces, the tourist attraction was also designated a component of Canada’s national heritage. The US government also increased its interest in the protection of heritage destinations, greatly expanding the list of national historic landmarks, sites, parks, and monuments. As postwar governments became more concerned with managing their economies, tourism quickly came to be seen as a key economic sector. The language of national heritage helped build public support for state intervention in natural and historic artifacts and sites that could be presented as sacred national places.

In Europe, many historic sites were devastated by bombardment during World War II. Aside from pressing humanitarian issues, heritage concerns also had to be addressed. In France, the war had destroyed nearly half a million buildings, principally in the northern cities, many of which were of clear heritage value. The French government established a commission to undertake the reconstruction of historic buildings and monuments and, in some cases, entire towns. Saint-Malo, in Brittany, had been completely destroyed, but the old walled town was rebuilt to its seventeenth century appearance. Already a seaside resort, the town added a heritage site destination. In the 1920s and 1930s, European fascist states had also employed heritage tourism. In Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany, workers’ leisure time was to be organized to prevent ordinary Italians and Germans from falling into unproductive leisure activities. Given the attachment to racialized views of purity and identity, organized tourism was encouraged to allow people to bond with their national heritage. Hiking in the Black Forest or the alpine Allgau might help connect Germans to the landscape and reconnect them to the traditional costumes and folkways of rural Germany. As Kristin Semmens argues, most studies of the Nazi misappropriation of the past ignore the displays of history aimed toward tourists at Germany’s heritage sites. Many museums and historic sites twisted their interpretations to fit the Nazi present. 37 In ways that foreshadowed the 1980s British left’s critique of heritage, fascist regimes made use of heritage tourism to control society. After the war, a vigorous program of denazification was undertaken to remove public relics of the Nazi regime and in formerly occupied territories, as was a program of reconstruction. In the communist east, blaming the Nazis for the destruction of German heritage was an ideological gift. It allowed the communist regime to establish itself as the true custodian of German identity and heritage. 38 In the capitalist west, tourism revived quickly. By early 1947, thirteen new tourist associations were active in the Allied occupation zone. Tourism rhetoric in the postwar years attempted to distance German heritage from the Nazi regime to reintroduce foreign travelers to the “real Germany.” Despite this objective, Alon Confino notes that traces of the Nazi past can be located in postwar tourist promotions that highlighted Nazi-era infrastructure. 39

Postwar Heritage Tourism

As tourism became a more global industry, thanks in no small part to the advent of affordable air travel in the postwar era, heritage tourism became transnational. Ethnic heritage tourism became more important, and diaspora or roots tourism, which brought second- and third-generation migrants back to the original home of their ancestors, accelerated. Commodifying ethnic heritage has been one of the most distinctive developments in twenty-first century tourism. Ethnic heritage tourism can involve migrants, their children, or grandchildren returning to their “home” countries as visitors. In this form of tourism, the “heritage” component is thus expressed in the motivations and self-identifications of the traveler. It involves a sense of belonging that is rooted in the symbolic meanings of collective memories, shared stories, and the sense of place embodied in the physical locations of the original homeland. Paul Basu has extensively studied the phenomenon of “roots tourism” among the descendants of Scottish Highlanders. He suggests that in their trips to Scotland to conduct genealogical research, explore sites connected to their ancestors, or sites connected to Scottish identity, they construct a sense of their heritage as expatriate Scots. 40 Similar “return” movements can be found in the migrant-descended communities of many settler colonial nations. For second-generation Chinese Americans visiting China, their search for authentic experiences mirrored those of other tourists. Yet, travel to their parents’ homeland strengthened their sense of family history and attachment to Chinese cultures. 41 On the other hand, Shaul Kellner examines the growing trend of cultivating roots tourism through state-sponsored homeland tours. In Tours that Bind , Kellner explores the State of Israel and American Jewish organizations’ efforts to forge a sense of Israeli heritage among young American Jews. However, Kellner cautions, individual experiences and human agency limit the hosts’ abilities to control the experience and thus control the sense of heritage. 42

Leisure tourism also played a role in developing heritage sites, as travelers to sunshine destinations began looking for more interesting side trips. Repeating the battlefield tourism of a century before, by the 1970s access to historic and prehistoric sites made it possible to add side trips to beach vacations. Perhaps the best example of this was the development of tourism to sites of Mayan heritage by the Mexican government in the 1970s. The most famous heritage sites, at least for Westerners, were the Mayan sites of Yucatan. First promoted as destinations by the American travel writer John Lloyd Stephens in the 1840s, their relative inaccessibility (as well as local political instabilities) made them unlikely tourist attractions before the twentieth century. By 1923, the Yucatan government had opened a highway to the site of the Chichén Itzá ruins, and local promoters began promotions in the 1940s. It was not until after the Mexican government nationalized all archaeological ruins in the 1970s that organized tours from Mexican beach resorts began to feature trips to the ruins themselves. 43

Mexico’s interest in the preservation and promotion of its archaeological relics coincided with one of the most important developments in heritage tourism in the postwar years: the emergence of the idea of world heritage. The idea was formalized in 1972 with the creation of UNESCO’s designation of World Heritage Sites. The number of sites has grown from the twelve first designated in 1978 to well over 1,000 in 167 different countries. In truth, the movement toward recognizing world heritage began with the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, which did not limit its activities to preserving only England’s architectural heritage. Out of its advocacy, European architects and preservationists drafted a series of accords, such as the Athens Charter of 1931, and the later Venice Charter of 1964, both of which emerged from a growing sense of cultural internationalism. These agreements set guidelines for the preservation and restoration of buildings and monuments. What UNESCO added was the criterion of Outstanding Universal Value for the designation of a place as world heritage. It took until 1980 to work out the first iteration of Outstanding Universal Value and the notion has never been universally accepted, although UNESCO member countries adhere to it officially. Once a site has been named to the list, member countries are expected to protect it from deterioration, although this does not always happen. As of 2018, 54 World Heritage Sites are considered endangered. This growth mirrored the massive expansion of tourism as a business and cultural phenomenon in the late twentieth century. As tourism became an increasingly important economic sector in de-colonizing states of Asia and Latin America, governments became more concerned with its promotion by seeking out World Heritage designation.

Ironically, World Heritage designation itself has been criticized as an endangerment of heritage sites. Designation increases the tourist appeal of delicate natural environments and historic places, which can lead to problems with maintenance. Designation also affects the lives of people living within the heritage destination. Luang Prabang, in Laos, is an interesting example. Designated in 1995 as one of the best-preserved traditional towns in Southeast Asia, it represents an architectural fusion of Lao temples and French colonial villas. UNESCO guidelines halted further development of the town, except as it served the tourist market. Within the designated heritage zone, buildings cannot be demolished or constructed, but those along the main street have been converted to guest houses, souvenir shops, and restaurants to accommodate the growing tourist economy. Critics claim this reorients the community in non-traditional ways, as locals move out of center in order to rent to foreign tourists. 44 While heritage tourism provided jobs and more stable incomes, it also encouraged urban sprawl and vehicle traffic as local inhabitants yielded their town to the influx of foreign, mostly Western, visitors.

Heritage tourism may hasten the pace of change by making destinations into attractions worth visiting. To accommodate the anticipated influx of global tourists, Luang Prabang airport was renovated and its runway extended to handle larger jets in between 2008 and 2013. The influx of tourists at Machu Picchu in Peru has repeatedly led the Peruvian government to attempt to control access to the site, yet dependent on tourism’s economic contribution, such restrictions are difficult. The temple at Borobudur in Indonesia undergoes near continuous maintenance work to repair the wear and tear caused by thousands of tourists walking its steps every day. Indeed, the preserved ruins are said to be under greater threat than when they were discovered in the early nineteenth century, overgrown by the jungle.

Another colonial aspect of world heritage designation stems from the narratives of the sites themselves. Many critics accuse UNESCO of a Eurocentric conception of Outstanding Universal Value and world heritage. 45 Cultural heritage destinations in non-Western countries are often associated with sites made famous by the projects of European imperialism. The fables of discovering ancient ruins, for instance, prioritize the romance of discovery. Many of the most famous non-Western sites were “discovered” by imperial agents in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Angkor Wat in Cambodia was introduced to the world by the French explorer Henri Muhot in 1860. Machu Picchu, the Mayan sites of Yucatan, and the ancestral Anasazi sites of the American southwest were excavated, in some cases purchased, and their narratives constructed by American and European adventurers. The cultural relics of these ancient places were looted and assembled in Western museums, the stories of adventure and discovery published for Western audiences, and eventually a travel infrastructure was established to bring mostly Western tourists to the destinations. Western tourism thus forms another kind of imperialism, as the heritage of a destination is determined to suit the expectations and motivations of the visitors. This tends to obscure other features of local history, leaving those features of heritage not suitable to the tourist trade less valuable.

Made or Experienced?

Heritage is both made and experienced. Critics of heritage tourism rightly point to the ways in which heritage promotions can manipulate the past to defend specific ideological or commercial values. Yet, at the same time, heritage experiences are honestly felt and fundamental in the shaping of modern national or cultural identities. Thus, the questions of what constitutes “heritage” in a tourist attraction and whether or not the experience is “authentic” are fundamentally connected and contradictory. Neither heritage nor authenticity can be separated from both the process of their construction and the motivations and expectations of visitors. This makes heritage tourism a slippery subject for study. It involves numerous contradictions and complications. Indeed, contradiction and dissonance are at the heart of any notion of heritage tourism; what might be heritage for some is merely leisure and consumption for others. The dissonance comes from this dichotomy: the consumer exploitation of a destination that is held by many to have sacred properties. Yet, as this chapter suggests, the construction of those sacred properties is at times dependent on the consumer culture of the tourism industry.

Further Reading

Ashworth, Gregory J. , and John E. Tunbridge . The Tourist-Historic City: Retrospect and Prospect of Managing the Heritage City . London: Routledge, 2001 .

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Basu, Paul.   Highland Homecomings: Genealogy and Heritage Tourism in the Scottish Diaspora . London: Routledge, 2006 .

Dearborn, Lynne M. , and John C. Stallmeyer . Inconvenient Heritage: Erasure and Global Tourism in Luang Prabang . Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2010 .

Hall, Melanie , ed. Towards World Heritage: International Origins of the Preservation Movement, 1880–1930 . Farnham: Ashgate, 2011 .

Hewison, Robert.   The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline . London: Methuen, 1987 .

Harrison, Rodney.   Heritage: Critical Approaches . New York: Routledge, 2013 .

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara.   Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998 .

Lowenthal, David.   The Past Is a Foreign Country: Revisited . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 .

Miles, Stephen.   The Western Front: Landscape, Tourism and Heritage . Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2017 .

Macdonald, Sharon.   Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today . London: Routledge, 2013 .

Park, Hyung Yu.   Heritage Tourism . London: Routledge, 2014 .

Shaffer, Marguerite S.   See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940 . Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001 .

Schama, Simon.   Landscape and Memory . New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1995 .

Sears, John F.   Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century . Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998 .

Timothy, Dallen J.   Cultural Heritage and Tourism: An Introduction . Bristol: Channel View, 2011 .

Winter, Tim.   Post-Conflict Heritage, Postcolonial Tourism: Culture, Politics and Development at Angkor . London: Routledge, 2007 .

1   Peter J. Larkham , “Heritage As Planned and conserved,” in Heritage, Tourism and Society , ed. David T. Herbert (London: Mansell, 1995), 85 ; Peter Johnson and Barry Thomas , “Heritage As Business,” in Heritage, Tourism and Society , ed. David T. Herbert (London: Mansell, 1995), 170 ; David Lowenthal , The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 94.

2   David C. Harvey , “The History of Heritage,” in Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity , eds. Brian Graham and Peter Howard (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 22.

3   Deepak Chhabra , Robert Healy , and Erin Sills , “Staged Authenticity and Heritage Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 30, no. 3 (2003): 702–719.

4   Tomaz Kolar and Vesna Zabkar , “A Consumer-Based Model of Authenticity: An Oxymoron or the Foundation of Cultural Heritage Marketing?” Tourism Management 31, no. 5 (2010): 652–664.

5   John Tunbridge and Gregory Ashworth , Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict (Chichester: J. Wiley, 1996), 10–13.

6 See Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History ; Robert Hewison , The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen London, 1987) ; Patrick Wright , On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985).

7   John A. Jakle , The Tourist: Travel in Twentieth-Century North America (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1985).

8   John F. Sears , Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).

9   Patricia Jasen , Wild Things: Nature, Culture, and Tourism in Ontario, 1790–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995).

10   Simon Schama , Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1995), 6–19 ; Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathan (eds.), Landscape, Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives (London and Sterling: Pluto, 2003), 2–3.

11   David Lowenthal , “European and English Landscapes as National Symbols,” in Geography and National Identity , ed. David Hoosen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 21–24 ; and David Lowenthal , “Landscape as Heritage,” in Heritage: Conservation, Interpretation and Enterprise , eds. J. D. Fladmark (London: Routledge, 1993), 10–11.

12   Katherine Grenier , Tourism and Identity in Scotland, 1770–1914: Creating Caledonia (London: Routledge, 2005), 5–11.

13   Patrick Young , Enacting Brittany: Tourism and Culture in Provincial France, 1871–1939 (Farnham; Burlington: Ashgate, 2012).

14   Christopher Chippindale , “The Making of the First Ancient Monuments Act, 1882, and Its Administration Under General Pitt-Rivers,” Journal of the British Archaeological Association 86 (1983): 1–55 ; Tim Murray , “The History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Archaeology: The Case of the Ancient Monuments Protection Act (1882),” in Histories of Archaeology: A Reader in the History of Archaeology , eds. Tim Murray and Christopher Evans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 145–176.

  National Trust Act, 1907 . 7 Edward 7, Ch cxxxvi, first schedule.

Other countries developed similar programs, especially after World War II: Australia, 1947; United States, 1949; Japan, 1964; and Italy, 1975.

17   Bosse Sundin , “Nature as Heritage: The Swedish Case,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 11, no. 1 (2005): 9–20.

18   Tait Keller , Apostles of the Alps: Mountaineering and Nation Building in Germany and Austria, 1860–1939 (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press Books, 2015).

19 See Karl Baedeker , The Eastern Alps, Including the Bavarian Highlands, The Tyrol, Salzkammergut, Styria, and Carinthia (Leipsic: K. Baedeker, 1879).

20   Eric Zuelow , A History of Modern Tourism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 108–109.

21   M. D. Merrill (ed.), Yellowstone and the Great West: Journals, Letters, and Images from the 1871 Hayden Expedition (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 210–211.

22   Alan Gordon , Making Public Pasts: The Contested Terrain of Montreal’s Public Memories (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001).

23   John Sandlos , “Nature’s Playgrounds: The Parks Branch and Tourism Promotion in the National Parks, 1911–1929,” in A Century of Parks Canada, 1911–2011 , ed. Claire Elizabeth Campbell (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2011).

24   Stephen Pyne , How the Canyon Became Grand (New York: Viking, 1998), 25–26, 55–60 ; J. W. Powell , The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons (New York: Dover Press, 1875).

25   Linda Rancourt , “Cultural Celebration,” National Parks 80, no. 1 (2006): 4.

26   Charles Wilson , The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1997).

27   Ian McKay and Robin Bates , In the Province of History: The Making of the Public Past in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 71–129.

28   Thomas A. Chambers , Memories of War Visiting Battlegrounds and Bonefields in the Early American Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2012).

29 See Alan Gordon, “Where Famous Heroes Fell: Tourism, History, and Liberalism in old Quebec,” 58–81 and J. I. Little , “In Search of the Plains of Abraham: British, American, and Canadian Views of a Symbolic Landscape, 1793–1913,” in Remembering 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Memory , eds. Phillip Buckner and John G. Reid (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 82–109.

30   John S. Patterson , “A Patriotic Landscape: Gettysburg, 1863–1913,” Prospects 7 (1982): 315–333.

31   David Lloyd , Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia and Canada, 1919–1939 (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1998), 100–111.

  Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism , 98–100.

33   George Humphrey Yetter , Williamsburg Before and After: The Rebirth of Virginia’s Colonial Capital (Colonial Williamsburg, 1988), 49–52 ; Stephen Conn , Museums and American intellectual life, 1876–1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 155.

34   Raymond B. Fosdick , John D. Rockefeller Jr.: A Portrait (New York: Harper, 1956), 356–357.

35   Michael Wallace , “Visiting the Past: History Museums in the United States,” in A Living History Reader , ed. Jay Anderson (Nashville: American Association of State and Local History, 1991), 190.

36   Alan Gordon , Time Travel: Tourism and the Rise of the Living History Museum in Mid-Twentieth-Century Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016), 65–70 ; Ben Bradley , “The David Thompson Memorial Fort: An Early Outpost of Historically Themed Tourism in Western Canada,” Histoire sociale/Social History 49, no. 99 (2016): 409–429.

37   Kristen Semmens , Seeing Hitler’s Germany: Tourism in the Third Reich (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

38   Gregory Ashworth and Peter Larkham , “A Heritage for Europe: The Need, the Task, the Contribution,” in Building a New Heritage , ed. Gregory Ashworth and Peter Larkham (London: Routledge, 1994), 127–129.

39   Alon Confino , “Traveling as a Culture of Remembrance: Traces of National Socialism in West Germany, 1945–1960,” History & Memory 12, no. 2 (2000): 92–121.

40 See, for example, Paul Basu , Highland Homecomings: Genealogy and Heritage Tourism in the Scottish Diaspora (London: Routledge, 2007).

41   Huang, Wei-Jue , Gregory Ramshaw , and William C. Norman . “Homecoming or Tourism? Diaspora Tourism Experience of Second-Generation Immigrants,” Tourism Geographies 18, no. 1 (2016): 59–79.

42   Shaul Kelner , Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage, and Israeli Birthright Tourism (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

43   Dina Berger , The Development of Mexico’s Tourism Industry: Pyramids by Day, Martinis by Night (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

44 See, for example, Dawn Starin , “Letter From Luang Prabang: World Heritage Designation, Blessing or Curse?” Critical Asian Studies 40, no. 4 (December 2008): 639–652.

45   Tim Winter , “Heritage Studies and the Privileging of Theory,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 20, no. 5 (2014): 556–572.

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Roaming Historian

Don't miss out on a rich, cultural travel experience. Through our tips, stories, & recommendations, Roaming Historian helps you uncover the past, save money, see a place to the fullest, and travel with ease. Come roam with us!

Why Visit Historical Places?

Having been a life-long lover of history, I used to be shocked when someone told me:

“I don’t like history.”

In my mind, they had just morphed into Cruella de Ville.

Who could not like history?!?

As it turns out…plenty of people. After teaching college-level history for many, many years, I’ve come across a plethora of students who don’t care for hearing about our past. I take them as a challenge. My job being to instill my passion for history in them and have them come to appreciate (if not adore) the past.

An easy way to do that is to get them out visiting historical sites. One of my projects for a Michigan history class affords students the chance to visit and analyze places where history occurred. As they travel around the state, they uncover the stories that historical places have to tell. An old lighthouse tells of the keeper who stayed vigilant throughout the night to keep sailors safe. A centennial office building showcases modern architectural techniques of the 1920s and famous Art Deco designs of the “Modern Era.” A church which served as a stop on the Underground Railroad speaks of the peril escaping slaves experienced and the bravery with which they sought freedom. And are there more tantalizing tales than those from Prohibition Era speakeasies? Through their historic site adventures, my students are able to unravel the past and learn how seemingly mundane places are woven into the fabric of history.

Why visit historical places?

• They connect us to the past. Through visiting these places where history occurred we find our roots. History allows us to feel like we are part of something much bigger. It humbles us while inexplicably making us feel stronger, because we come from a long line of survivors, and special, because we are part of this vast chain of humanity.
• They connect us to other cultures. By seeing places from the past in other areas, I am able to relate to those people. I can see similarities between their culture and mine, as well as differences. Both of which help me feel a deeper understanding of others.
• They help us realize we aren’t alone with our situations. Throughout time immemorial, people have grappled with the same issues. A church in Italy may look different than a church in Michigan, but they express the same purpose of uniting people who are looking for a place to express their faith. I enjoy seeing the subtle variations in public buildings. In the States, our financial buildings often employ the same architectural styles as ancient Greek temples. I find the similarities between the New York Stock Exchange, US Supreme Court, and Athenian Parthenon fascinating (see below). The grandness of a building often indicates the importance it is given by a society.
• They tantalize us. Historical places let us be voyeurs into the past. They give us the chance to time travel and pull back the curtain on a different age.
• They allow us to fantasize. We can live like the rich and famous (until the palace closes for the day). Wander in the gardens of kings. Drink wine in a cafe where philosophers met. Pretend to hear the roar of the crowd at a gladiatorial game. Visiting a historic site is similar to another favorite pastime of mine…reading. It is escapism at its finest.

Like what you just read? You can support me by following my blog and leaving comments–I love to hear from my readers. Happy travels! Amy

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10 thoughts on “why visit historical places”.

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I absolutely like how you said that we discover our roots by traveling to these historical sites because history makes us feel that we are a part of something much larger. Because we come from a long line of survivors and are connected to a large chain of humanity, you also shared how it makes us feel unique while also humbling us. This is beautiful, really. And you know what… maybe I’ll go on a guided history tour with my boyfriend this month and see what we can both learn from it. I am so excited!

Like Liked by 1 person

Thank you! If you do go on a history sightseeing adventure, let me know where you went…I love seeing our shared past through other’s eyes. And if you need a recommendation for a guide, drop me a line and I’ll see if I know someone. Happy travels!

What. If I want to find the importance of studying historical places

For full context, you could research a place before you go, or taking a course on the subject (your local community college might have one), but many historical sites have experts on the site to help answer questions (or they provide information at the site or on their website).

Also, a tour with an expert guide is a great way to learn more.

I teach adult ESOL and found your article really helpful. We try to encourage parents to engage with their children in ways that provide learning opportunities for the whole family. Your article has inspired a lesson on discovering our community. The summary of reasons why we should visit historical places is perfect. I think I will even make a contest to see who can visit the most historical places between now and the end of the year!

That is wonderful! I assign a project for my college students where they visit historical sites…it is quite popular. Students love to travel around the state to see what they can uncover; many of them make it a family event and teach their children along the way. Thank you for sharing!

Thanks for sharing, I discovered what brought me here and more

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How Heritage Tourism Helps People Unlock the Past

Heritage tourism provides a great way to learn about the past, but what exactly is it? Check out this guide to learn about this new travel trend!

Throughout the past decade or so, people have begun to look at travel in a completely different way. Experiential travel has become a new buzzword to describe travel with that little extra something to it. This new way of traveling looks different for everyone whether you prefer outdoor activities, cultural exchanges, history, or a bit of everything!

This travel revolution means there are more and more opportunities to shape a trip around your particular interests. History buffs will be happy to know that heritage tourism has emerged as one of the new types of travel, and many different destinations and private organizations are focusing on creating their own heritage tourism programs to help cater to this growing tourism market!

Take a step back in time with Let’s Roam .

Here at Let’s Roam, we have no shortage of history buffs on our staff! Our knowledgeable team has created a range of exciting scavenger hunts that will help you explore the biggest tourist attractions and the hidden gems in a destination. These are all accessible via our handy Let’s Roam app . Plus, the Let’s Roam Explorer blog features hundreds of articles to help make trip planning easy!

Exploring the Past through Heritage Tourism 

Below you’ll find a guide to heritage tourism and how it can help you unlock the past. We’ve included a description of what heritage tourism is and how it helps local communities. In addition, we’ve included a short list of some of our favorite heritage travel destinations!

What is heritage tourism?

The term heritage tourism has become a bit of a buzzword in recent years. However, you may find yourself wondering what exactly heritage tourism is. According to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, heritage tourism is “traveling to experience the places, artifacts, and activities that authentically represent the stories and people of the past and present.” This means spending time visiting historic places, museums, and archeological attractions. 

However, heritage tourism is more than simply visiting an attraction and checking it off a long to-do list. It means taking the time to truly understand what you’re seeing as well as the impact it has on people. Who lived or worked there? What did their daily lives look like? How did they interact with others?

Heritage tourism is often linked with sustainability since it conveys a more conscious way of traveling. This type of travel generally goes hand in hand with using fewer natural resources. It can also be a great opportunity for tourism development in off-the-beaten-track destinations. This can then be a major contributor to broader economic development and a higher quality of life. Since this type of travel is generally different than mass travel, it also helps promote sustainable development and caring responsibly for cultural resources, historic resources, and natural resources.

What is the purpose of heritage tourism?

 In the words of George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Heritage tourism serves as a way to connect us to the past. It helps us understand how people lived, loved, and laughed. Knowing this can help us better understand the world that we are currently living in. It can also help us analyze why certain things happened in history and how we can learn from it.

On a more personal level, heritage tourism can help people more closely identify with their own ancestors and heritage. There are many different tour operators that offer itineraries full of cultivated experiences that have a special emphasis on culture and history. A good example of this is Birthright, the program that sends young Jewish people to Israel to learn more about Judaism. 

However, you don’t need to go on an organized tour for this. Instead, you can shape your own itinerary so that it incorporates certain aspects that you want to learn more about. For instance, as an American of German and British descent, I’ve made many trips to Germany and the United Kingdom to learn more about my family background. 

How does heritage tourism impact destinations?

When placed under the stewardship of ethical institutions, nonprofit organizations, and partnerships with key stakeholders, heritage tourism has a much gentler approach than other types of tourism. It can offer many economic benefits to destinations. Case studies have shown that heritage tourists tend to stay longer in a destination. They also spend more money while they’re there. This means the economic impact of heritage tourists is greater than other types of tourists.

One of the most obvious economic benefits is that heritage tourism provides employment opportunities. These could range from historians to tour guides as well as support employees at the heritage sites. The tourism industry has one of the lowest barriers to entry when it comes to employment. Heritage tourism can create jobs that are likely to go to the local population. This means that the money stays in the local communities that need it most. 

This, in turn, helps the local economy in numerous ways by allowing more money to be spent at local businesses. In some parts of the world, this could mean the difference between someone being able to stay in their hometown with their friends and family vs. having to go to a big city and look for work. This usually ensures that people have a wider support network nearby which is crucial to their well-being. 

The money generated from tickets can also help preserve the monuments, artifacts, and heritage sites that you’re seeing. This is an incredibly important aspect of conservation. Many of the world’s most important historic sites are falling into disrepair due to unstable economies, civil wars, and other domestic issues. The revenue from ticket sales could make a huge difference in the upkeep and maintenance of the monuments. 

What are some tips and tricks for heritage tourism?

If you’re trying to learn more about the past when visiting historic sites, make sure that you have at least a rough idea as to why the site is important. Although most places will provide enough information to piece together a basic idea, spending the time to read up on it before you go will make your experience much more fulfilling. 

It’s also important to allow yourself plenty of time at each destination. This is the only way that you can truly immerse yourself in it. Also, try to avoid going to historic sites during peak travel hours. Having fewer tourists around makes it much easier to imagine what the places would have looked like. 

What are some of the best destinations for heritage tourism?

Below you’ll find a list of some of our favorite heritage tourism destinations. While this list is in no way exhaustive, it does give you an idea of what types of things fall under the umbrella of heritage tourism. We’ve also included a short section on important things that you should know when visiting any of these destinations.

As one of the oldest civilizations in the world, India has a slew of heritage sites. These can give a comprehensive look into how it transformed from the Indus Valley civilization to the livable, chaotic country we know and love today. The country is full of UNESCO World Heritage sites so this is a good place to start your planning.

Where to go? 

Most visitors begin their trip in Delhi. This is perfect for history buffs. Not only is Delhi the capital of India, but it’s also the location of many previous ancient cities. You can still find vestiges of these in the many forts and tombs in South Delhi as well as the winding streets of Old Delhi. 

Old Delhi was designed by Shah Jahan of Taj Mahal fame. As you wander through the tiny streets crammed full of shops, eateries, and chai-wallahs, it feels like little has changed in the past few centuries. From Delhi, you can easily get on a train to Agra to see the Taj Mahal or Jaipur within a few hours. If you’re interested in religious history, you should also check out Amritsar in the northern state of Punjab. This is the heart of Sikhism and is the home of the breathtaking Golden Temple. 

Alternatively, an overnight train ride will get you to the lakeside city of Udaipur or the spiritual capital of Varanasi where people deposit the bodies or ashes of their deceased family members in the holy Ganges River.

If you’re willing to brave the overnight bus, you can also head to Rishikesh. Sitting in the foothills of the Himalayas, Rishikesh was the birthplace of yoga and a very popular destination for spiritual and yoga-oriented retreats. 

A short flight from Delhi will get you to Mumbai or Calcutta. These two cities were important economic and political centers for the British Raj. This is where you’ll find many colonial-era buildings that look like they could be straight out of London. 

Important things to know . 

The history of India is very long and complex. As you travel, it’s a good idea to jot things down as you go. This is particularly useful for keeping track of Hinduism’s most important gods and kings.  

Also, India can be an extremely stressful and uncomfortable country to travel through. Virtually everywhere you go will be crowded, and it will feel like half of the population is trying to get a photo with you. Rather than stressing out about it, just try and take a deep breath and learn to enjoy the chaos. It will make your experience there much more enjoyable. With a more laid-back attitude, you’re also more likely to see how incredibly kind and welcoming most Indians are and what a great sense of humor they have. 

Why go?  

When it comes to tourist destinations, Thailand has pretty much everything you could possibly want. With the beaches of Koh Samui, the vibrant nightlife of Bangkok, and the green rolling hills of Chiang Mai, there is something for everyone here. Best of all, it’s full of amazing heritage sites that give a fascinating look into Thailand’s history and culture.

As one of the only countries in Southeast Asia that was never colonized, Thailand doesn’t really have the same European-style architecture that you find in neighboring countries. Bangkok is a vibrant capital city that is as sparkly as they come. The city is also home to incredible palaces and temples, including the famous Wat Pho which holds an enormous reclining Buddha. While you’re there, make sure not to miss the vibrant Grand Palace. We guarantee it’s not like any palace you have ever seen before!

Lying just a short train ride from Bangkok, the former capital city of Ayutthaya. It was once one of the biggest cities in the world with a population of nearly one million people. Today, you’ll find it mostly destroyed but even in its current state, it’s still breathtaking. The complex is famous for its 67 temples and ruins.

In the northern section of the country, Chiang Mai is famous for its myriad of temples. These tell an important story of the impact that Buddhism has had on the local population. This bustling city is the largest urban area in northern Thailand and has been a hub for remote workers and backpackers for decades. It’s a great place to base yourself if you want to enjoy some of Thailand’s gorgeous natural landscapes or visit one of the local hill tribes.

Important things to know.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, Thailand basically exploded onto the tourism scene. This huge influx of mass tourism brought with it a few problems. Sex tourism has become very prevalent and can sometimes include underage people. It also comes with drugs and other social issues. When you travel there, it’s best to avoid any of these things. This not only keeps you out of possible trouble but also shows respect for Thai culture. 

New Zealand

New Zealand has long been famous for its beautiful scenery and outdoor activities. Despite its location in the middle of nowhere, they have also managed to develop into one of the world’s bucket list destinations. 

There are many reasons to visit the Land of the Long White Cloud. Perhaps one of the world leaders when it comes to cultural heritage tourism, New Zealand proudly embraces its Maori culture, and the government has created many initiatives to help educate people on the country’s history. You will be greeted with a hearty Kia Ora from the moment your flight lands at Auckland Airport, and the opportunities to learn more about the indigenous population are endless. 

Where to go?

Most long-haul flights fly into the city of Auckland on New Zealand’s North Island. Although there’s little in the way of historic sites here, a quick visit to the imposing Auckland Museum will teach you some important aspects of Maori culture. 

From Auckland, you can take a bus or rent a car to visit various Maori sites located across the North Island. These include the Te Pā Tū Māori Village , the Waitangi Treaty Grounds where one of New Zealand’s founding documents was signed, and the Waipoua Forest, one of the oldest forests in New Zealand which plays an important role in Maori culture.

New Zealand is an amazing destination to visit but it can be painfully expensive to travel through. If you’re traveling on a budget, we highly recommend renting a campervan that you can sleep in. This can help save a lot of money rather than staying in expensive hotel rooms. 

It’s hard to think of heritage tourism and not imagine Italy. The ancient ruins of the Coliseum and the Roman Forum stand testament to an advanced society that thrived over two millennia ago. Meanwhile, the Duomo and Uffizi Museum in Florence holds some of the world’s most spectacular art. 

One of the great things about traveling through Italy is that it has a little bit of everything. And everything they have is magical. From small towns lined with cobblestone streets that have barely changed for hundreds of years to bustling metropolises that have historic sites hidden behind every corner, there is always something interesting for history buffs to explore. As the icing on the cake, the gastronomic scene is incomparable. 

The major cities of Rome, Venice, and Florence should be the first stop on a heritage tourism tour. If you want to focus on smaller towns and villages, you can always visit the spell-binding villages of Cinque Terre National Park or hang around some of the smaller towns of Tuscany. Italy has heritage sites virtually everywhere so you really can’t go wrong! Find out more about exploring this beautiful country on our detailed guide of how to spend a week in Italy !

Italy is full of tourists all year round. However, it’s literally bursting at the seams during the high season. Try to avoid going in the summer if you can. It will make your overall trip much more enjoyable since you won’t be battling crowds or wasting precious vacation time standing in lines. 

What other places should you go?

While we’ve provided just a short list of great destinations for heritage tourism, there are still many more! Mexico , Egypt, Morocco, Japan, the Czech Republic, Sudan, and Iran are also all great options. They’re all full of cultural heritage sites that are sure to wow even the most jaded history buff!

Are you ready to roam?

We hope this guide to heritage tourism has left you inspired to take a step back into the past! As always, we would love to hear your feedback, and please let us know of any tips, tricks, or destinations we may have missed! 

If you’d like to find more information about these destinations mentioned above, make sure to check out the Let’s Roam Explorer blog . Here you’ll find hundreds of destination guides, must-see lists, and travel blogs that will help make your vacation planning easier. Don’t forget to download the Let’s Roam app before you go. This gives you access to all of our great scavenger hunts , ghost walks, art tours, and pub crawls. 

Frequently Asked Questions

The purpose of heritage tourism is to explore the past by visiting archeological sites, museums, and historic attractions. Read more about heritage tourism at the Let’s Roam Explorer blog !

Activities normally associated with heritage tourism could be visiting the ancient ruins of Rome or Mexico , going to a local museum, or even going on a walking tour focusing on unique architecture.

Heritage tourism is different than tourism because it focuses on activities and attractions that are dedicated to preserving the past.

Understanding our heritage is important because it’s easier to understand the world around us. Heritage tourism can play a key role in unlocking the past and bringing it back to life.

If you’re looking for a fascinating heritage tourism destination , look no further than India, Thailand, Italy , New Zealand, Mexico, Morocco, or Egypt!

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Chapter 1. History and Overview

Learning Objectives

• Specify the commonly understood definitions of tourism and tourist
• Classify tourism into distinct industry groups using North American Industry Classification Standards (NAICS)
• Define hospitality  
• Gain knowledge about the origins of the tourism industry
• Provide an overview of the economic, social, and environmental impacts of tourism worldwide
• Understand the history of tourism development in Canada and British Columbia
• Analyze the value of tourism in Canada and British Columbia
• Identify key industry associations and understand their mandates

What Is Tourism?

Before engaging in a study of tourism , let’s have a closer look at what this term means.

Definition of Tourism

There are a number of ways tourism can be defined, and for this reason, the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO)  embarked on a project from 2005 to 2007 to create a common glossary of terms for tourism. It defines tourism as follows:

Tourism is a social, cultural and economic phenomenon which entails the movement of people to countries or places outside their usual environment for personal or business/professional purposes. These people are called visitors (which may be either tourists or excursionists; residents or non-residents) and tourism has to do with their activities, some of which imply tourism expenditure ( United Nations World Tourism Organization , 2008).

Using this definition, we can see that tourism is the movement of people for a number of purposes (whether business or pleasure).

Definition of Tourist

Building on the definition of tourism, a commonly accepted description of a  tourist is “someone who travels at least 80 km from his or her home for at least 24 hours, for business or leisure or other reasons” (LinkBC, 2008, p.8). The United Nations World Tourism Organization (1995) helps us break down this definition further by stating tourists can be:

• Domestic (residents of a given country travelling only within that country)
• Inbound (non-residents travelling in a given country)
• Outbound (residents of one country travelling in another country)

The scope of tourism, therefore, is broad and encompasses a number of activities.

Spotlight On: United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO)

UNWTO is the United Nations agency responsible “for the promotion of responsible, sustainable and universally accessible tourism” (UNWTO, 2014b). Its membership includes 156 countries and over 400 affiliates such as private companies and non-governmental organizations. It promotes tourism as a way of developing communities while encouraging ethical behaviour to mitigate negative impacts. For more information, visit the UNWTO website : http://www2.unwto.org/.

NAICS: The North American Industry Classification System

Given the sheer size of the tourism industry, it can be helpful to break it down into broad industry groups using a common classification system. The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) was jointly created by the Canadian, US, and Mexican governments to ensure common analysis across all three countries (British Columbia Ministry of Jobs, Tourism and Skills Training, 2013a). The tourism-related groupings created using NAICS are (in alphabetical order):

• Accommodation
• Food and beverage services (commonly known as “F & B”)
• Recreation and entertainment
• Transportation
• Travel services

These industry groups are based on the similarity of the “labour processes and inputs” used for each (Government of Canada, 2013). For instance, the types of employees and resources required to run an accommodation business — whether it be a hotel, motel, or even a campground — are quite similar. All these businesses need staff to check in guests, provide housekeeping, employ maintenance workers, and provide a place for people to sleep. As such, they can be grouped together under the heading of accommodation. The same is true of the other four groupings, and the rest of this text explores these  industry groups, and other aspects of tourism, in more detail. 

The Hospitality Industry

When looking at tourism it’s important to consider the term  hospitality . Some define hospitality as “t he business of helping people to feel welcome and relaxed and to enjoy themselves” (Discover Hospitality, 2015, ¶ 3). Simply put, the hospitality industry is the combination of the accommodation and food and beverage groupings, collectively making up the largest segment of the industry. You’ll learn more about accommodations and F & B in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, respectively. 

Before we seek to understand the five industry groupings in more detail, it’s important to have an overview of the history and impacts of tourism to date.

Global Overview

Origins of tourism.

Travel for leisure purposes has evolved from an experience reserved for very few people into something enjoyed by many. Historically, the ability to travel was reserved for royalty and the upper classes. From ancient Roman times through to the 17th century, young men of high standing were encouraged to travel through Europe on a “grand tour” (Chaney, 2000). Through the Middle Ages, many societies encouraged the practice of religious pilgrimage, as reflected in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and other literature.

The word hospitality  predates the use of the word tourism , and first appeared in the 14th century. It is derived from the Latin hospes , which encompasses the words guest, host , and foreigner (Latdict, 2014). The word tourist  appeared in print much later, in 1772 (Griffiths and Griffiths, 1772). William Theobald suggests that the word  tour  comes from Greek and Latin words for circle and turn, and that tourism and tourist  represent the activities of   circling away from home, and then returning (Theobald, 1998).

Tourism Becomes Business

Cox & Kings, the first known travel agency, was founded in 1758 when Richard Cox became official travel agent of the British Royal Armed Forces (Cox & Kings, 2014).  Almost 100 years later, in June 1841, Thomas Cook opened the first leisure travel agency, designed to help Britons improve their lives by seeing the world and participating in the temperance movement. In 1845, he ran his first commercial packaged tour, complete with cost-effective railway tickets and a printed guide (Thomas Cook, 2014).

The continued popularity of rail travel and the emergence of the automobile presented additional milestones in the development of tourism. In fact, a long journey taken by Karl Benz’s wife in 1886 served to kick off interest in auto travel and helped to publicize his budding car company, which would one day become Mercedes Benz (Auer, 2006). We take a closer look at the importance of car travel later this chapter, and of transportation to the tourism industry in Chapter 2.

Fast forward to 1952 with the first commercial air flights from London, England, to Johannesburg, South Africa, and Colombo, Sri Lanka (Flightglobal, 2002) and the dawn of the jet age, which many herald as the start of the modern tourism industry. The 1950s also saw the creation of Club Méditérannée (Gyr, 2010) and similar club holiday destinations, the precursor of today’s all-inclusive resorts.

The decade that followed is considered to have been a significant period in tourism development, as more travel companies came onto the scene, increasing competition for customers and moving toward “mass tourism, introducing new destinations and modes of holidaying” (Gyr, 2010, p. 32).

Industry growth has been interrupted at several key points in history, including World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. At the start of this century, global events thrust international travel into decline including the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center in New York City (known as 9/11), the war in Iraq, perceived threat of future terrorist attacks, and health scares including SARS, BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), and West Nile virus (Government of Canada, 2006).

At the same time, the industry began a massive technological shift as increased internet use revolutionized travel services. Through the 2000s, online travel bookings grew exponentially, and by 2014 global leader Expedia had expanded to include brands such as Hotels.com, the Hotwire Group, trivago, and Expedia CruiseShip Centers, earning revenues of over $4.7 million (Expedia Inc., 2013).

A more in-depth exploration of the impact of the online marketplace, and other trends in global tourism, is provided in Chapter 14. But as you can already see, the impacts of the global tourism industry today are impressive and far reaching. Let’s have a closer look at some of these outcomes.

Tourism Impacts

Tourism impacts can be grouped into three main categories: economic, social, and environmental. These impacts are analyzed using data gathered by businesses, governments, and industry organizations.

Economic Impacts

According to a UNWTO report, in 2011, “international tourism receipts exceeded US$1 trillion for the first time” (UNWTO, 2012). UNWTO Secretary-General Taleb Rifai stated this excess of $1 trillion was especially important news given the global economic crisis of 2008, as tourism could help rebuild still-struggling economies, because it is a key export and labour intensive (UNWTO, 2012). 

Tourism around the world is now worth over $1 trillion annually, and it’s a growing industry almost everywhere. Regions with the highest growth in terms of tourism dollars earned are the Americas, Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and Africa. Only the Middle East posted negative growth at the time of the report (UNWTO, 2012).

While North and South America are growing the fastest, Europe continues to lead the way in terms of overall percentage of dollars earned (UNWTO, 2012):

• Europe (45%)
• Asia and the Pacific (28%)
• North and South America (19%)
• Middle East (4%)

Global industry growth and high receipts are expected to continue. In its August 2014 expenditure barometer, the UNWTO found worldwide visitation had increased by 22 million people in the first half of the year over the previous year, to reach 517 million visits (UNWTO, 2014a). As well, the UNWTO’s  Tourism 2020 Vision predicts that  international arrivals will reach nearly 1.6 billion by 2020 . Read more about the Tourism 2020 Vision : http://www.e-unwto.org/doi/abs/10.18111/9789284403394

Social Impacts

In addition to the economic benefits of tourism development, positive social impacts include an increase in amenities (e.g., parks, recreation facilities), investment in arts and culture, celebration of First Nations people, and community pride. When developed conscientiously, tourism can, and does, contribute to a positive quality of life for residents.

However, as identified by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP, 2003a), negative social impacts of tourism can include:

• Change or loss of indigenous identity and values
• Culture clashes
• Physical causes of social stress (increased demand for resources)
• Ethical issues (such as an increase in sex tourism or the exploitation of child workers)

Some of these issues are explored in further detail in Chapter 12, which examines the development of Aboriginal tourism in British Columbia.

Environmental Impacts

Tourism relies on, and greatly impacts, the natural environment in which it operates. Even though many areas of the world are conserved in the form of parks and protected areas, tourism development can have severe negative impacts. According to UNEP (2003b), these can include:

• Depletion of natural resources (water, forests, etc.)
• Pollution (air pollution, noise, sewage, waste and littering)
• Physical impacts (construction activities, marina development, trampling, loss of biodiversity)

The environmental impacts of tourism can reach outside local areas and have an effect on the global ecosystem. One example is increased air travel, which is a major contributor to climate change. Chapter 10 looks at the environmental impacts of tourism in more detail.

Whether positive or negative, tourism is a force for change around the world, and the industry is transforming at a staggering rate. But before we delve deeper into our understanding of tourism, let’s take a look at the development of the sector in our own backyard.

Canada Overview

Origins of tourism in canada.

Tourism has long been a source of economic development for our country. Some argue that as early as 1534 the explorers of the day, such as Jacques Cartier, were Canada’s first tourists (Dawson, 2004), but most agree the major developments in Canada’s tourism industry followed milestones in the transportation sector: by rail, by car, and eventually, in the skies.

Railway Travel: The Ties That Bind

The dawn of the railway age in Canada came midway through the 19th century. The first railway was launched in 1836 (Library and Archives Canada, n.d.), and by the onset of World War I in 1914, four railways dominated the Canadian landscape: Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), Canadian Northern Railway (CNOR), the Grand Trunk Railway (GTR), and the Grand Trunk Pacific (GTP). Unfortunately, their rapid expansion soon brought the last three into near bankruptcy (Library and Archives Canada, n.d.).

In 1923, these three rail companies were amalgamated into the Canadian National Railway (CNR), and together with the CPR, these trans-continentals dominated the Canadian travel landscape until other forms of transportation became more popular. In 1978, with declining interest in rail travel, the CPR and CNR were forced to combine their passenger services to form VIA Rail (Library and Archives Canada, n.d.).

The Rise of the Automobile

The rising popularity of car travel was partially to blame for the decline in rail travel, although it took time to develop. When the first cross-country road trip took place in 1912, there were only 16 kilometres of paved road across Canada (MacEachern, 2012). Cars were initially considered a nuisance, and the National Parks Branch banned entry to automobiles, but later slowly began to embrace them. By the 1930s, some parks, such as Cape Breton Highlands National Park, were actually created to provide visitors with scenic drives (MacEachern, 2012).

It would take decades before a coast-to-coast highway was created, with the Trans-Canada Highway officially opening in Revelstoke in 1962. When it was fully completed in 1970, it was the longest national highway in the world, spanning one-fifth of the globe (MacEachern, 2012).

Early Tourism Promotion

As early as 1892, enterprising Canadians like the Brewsters became the country’s first tour operators, leading guests through areas such as Banff National Park (Brewster Travel Canada, 2014). Communities across Canada developed their own marketing strategies as transportation development took hold. For instance, the town of Maisonneuve in Quebec launched a campaign from 1907 to 1915 calling itself “Le Pittsburg du Canada.” And by 1935 Quebec was spending $250,000 promoting tourism, with Ontario, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia also enjoying established provincial tourism bureaus (Dawson, 2004).

National Airlines

Our national airline, Air Canada, was formed in 1937 as Trans-Canada Air Lines. In many ways, Air Canada was a world leader in passenger aviation, introducing the world’s first computerized reservations system in 1963 ( Globe and Mail , 2014). Through the 1950s and 1960s, reduced airfares saw increased mass travel. Competitors including Canadian Pacific (which became Canadian Airlines in 1987) began to launch international flights during this time to Australia, Japan, and South America ( Canadian Geographic, 2000). By 2000, Air Canada was facing financial peril and forced to restructure. A numbered company, owned in part by Air Canada, purchased 82% of Canadian Airline’s shares, with the result of Air Canada becoming the country’s only national airline ( Canadian Geographic, 2000).

Parks and Protected Areas

A look at the evolution of tourism in Canada would be incomplete without a quick study of our national parks and protected areas. The official conserving of our natural spaces began around the same time as the railway boom, and in 1885 Banff was established as Canada’s first national park. By 1911, the Dominion Forest Reserves and Parks Act created the Dominion Parks Branch, the first of its kind in the world (Shoalts, 2011).

The systemic conservation and celebration of Canada’s parks over the next century would help shape Canada’s identity, both at home and abroad. Through the 1930s, conservation officers and interpreters were hired to enhance visitor experiences. By 1970, the National Park System Plan divided Canada into 39 regions, with the goal of preserving each distinct ecosystem for future generations. In 1987, the country’s first national marine park was established in Ontario, and in the 20 years that followed, 10 new national parks and marine conservation areas were created (Shoalts, 2011).

The role of parks and protected areas in tourism is explored in greater detail in Chapter 5 (recreation) and Chapter 10 (environmental stewardship).

Global Shock and Industry Decline

As with the global industry, Canada’s tourism industry was impacted by world events such as the Great Depression and the World Wars.

More recently, global events such as 9/11, the SARS outbreak, and the war in Iraq took their toll on tourism receipts. Worldwide arrivals to Canada dropped 1% to 694 million in 2003, after three years of stagnant growth. In 2005, spending reached $61.4 billion with domestic travel accounting for 71% (Government of Canada, 2006).

Tourism in Canada Today

In 2011, tourism created $78.8 billion in total economic activity and 603,400 jobs. Tourism accounted for more of Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP) than agriculture, forestry, and fisheries combined (Tourism Industry Association of Canada, 2014).

Spotlight On: The Tourism Industry Association of Canada (TIAC)

Founded in 1930 and based in Ottawa, the Tourism Industry Association of Canada (TIAC) is the national private-sector advocate for the industry. Its goal is to support policies and programs that help the industry grow, while representing over 400 members including airports, concert halls, festivals and events, travel services providers, and businesses of all sizes. For more information, visit the Tourism Industry Association of Canada’s website : http://tiac.travel/About.html

Unfortunately, while overall receipts from tourism appear healthy, and globally the industry is growing, according to a recent report, Canada’s historic reliance on the US market (which traditionally accounts for 75% of our market) is troubling. Because three out of every four international visitors to Canada originates in the United States, the 55% decline in that market since 2000 is being very strongly felt here. Many feel the decline in American visitors to Canada can be attributed to tighter passport and border regulations, the economic downturn (including the 2008 global economic crisis), and a stronger Canadian dollar (TIAC, 2014).

Despite disappointing numbers from the United States, Canada continues to see strong visitation from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, and China. In 2011, we welcomed 3,180,262 tourists from our top 15 inbound countries (excluding the United States). Canadians travelling domestically accounted for 80% of tourism revenues in the country, and TIAC suggested that a focus on rebounding US visitation would help grow the industry (TIAC, 2014).

Spotlight On: The Canadian Tourism Commission

Housed in Vancouver, Destination Canada , previously the Canadian Tourism Commission (CTC), is responsible for promoting Canada in several foreign markets: Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It works with private companies, travel services providers, meeting professionals, and government organizations to help leverage Canada’s tourism brand,  Canada. Keep Exploring . It also conducts research and has a significant image library (Canadian Tourism Commission, 2014). For more information, visit  Destination Canada website : http://en.destinationcanada.com/about-ctc.

As organizations like TIAC work to confront barriers to travel, the Canadian Tourism Commission (CTC) is active abroad, encouraging more visitors to explore our country. In Chapter 8, we’ll delve more into the challenges and triumphs of selling tourism at home and abroad.

The great news for British Columbia is that once in Canada, most international visitors tend to remain in the province they landed in, and BC is one of three provinces that receives the bulk of this traffic (TIAC, 2012). In fact, BC’s tourism industry is one of the healthiest in Canada today. Let’s have a look at how our provincial industry was established and where it stands now.

British Columbia Overview

Origins of tourism in bc.

As with the history of tourism in Canada, it’s often stated that the first tourists to BC were explorers. In 1778, Captain James Cook touched down on Vancouver Island, followed by James Douglas in 1842, a British agent who had been sent to find new headquarters for the Hudson’s Bay Company, ultimately choosing Victoria. Through the 1860s, BC’s gold rush attracted prospectors from around the world, with towns and economies springing up along the trail (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2009).

Railway Travel: Full Steam Ahead!

The development of BC’s tourism industry began in earnest in the late 1800s when the CPR built accommodation properties along itsnewly completed trans-Canada route, capturing revenues from overnight stays to help alleviate their increasing corporate debt. Following the 1886 construction of small lodges at stops in Field, Rogers Pass, and Fraser Canyon, the CPR opened the Hotel Vancouver in May 1887 (Dawson, 2004).

As opposed to Atlantic Canada, where tourism promotion centred around attracting hunters and fishermen for a temporary infusion of cash, in British Columbia tourism was seen as a way to lure farmers and settlers to stay in the new province. Industry associations began to form quickly: the Tourist Association of Victoria (TAV) in February 1902, and the Vancouver Tourist Association in June of the same year (Dawson, 2004).

Many of the campaigns struck by these and other organizations between 1890 and 1930 centred on the province’s natural assets, as people sought to escape modern convenience and enjoy the environment. A collaborative group called the Pacific Northwest Travel Association (BC, Washington, and Oregon) promoted “The Pacific Northwest: The World’s Greatest Out of Doors,” calling BC “The Switzerland of North America.” Promotions like these seemed to have had an effect: in 1928, over 370,000 tourists visited Victoria, spending over $3.5 million (Dawson, 2004).

The Great Depression and World War II

As the world’s economy was sent into peril during the Great Depression in the 1930s, tourism was seen as an economic solution. A newly renamed Greater Victoria Publicity Bureau touted a “100 for 1” multiplier effect of tourism spending, with visitor revenues accounting for around 13.5% of BC’s income in 1930. By 1935, an organization known as the TTDA (Tourist Trade Development Association of Victoria and Vancouver Island) looked to create a more stable industry through strategies to increase visitors’ length of stay (Dawson, 2004).

In 1937, the provincial Bureau of Industrial and Tourist Development (BITD) was formed through special legislation with a goal of increasing tourist traffic. By 1938, the organization changed its name to the British Columbia Government Travel Bureau (BCGTB) and was granted a budget increase to $105,000. This was soon followed by an expansion of the BC Tourist Council designed to solicit input from across the province. And in 1939, Vancouver welcomed the King and Queen of England and celebrated the opening of the Lions Gate Bridge, activities that reportedly bolstered tourism numbers (Dawson, 2004).

The December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii had negative repercussions for tourism on the Pacific Rim and was responsible for an era of decreased visitation to British Columbia, despite attempts by some to market the region as exciting. From 1939 to 1943, US visits to Vancouver (measured at the border) dropped from over 307,000 to approximately 183,600. Just two years later, however, that number jumped to 369,250, the result of campaigns like the 1943 initiative aimed at Americans that marketed BC as “comrades in war” (Dawson, 2004).

Post-War Rebound

We, with all due modesty, cannot help but claim that we are entering British Columbia’s half-century, and cannot help but observe that B.C. also stands for BOOM COUNTRY. – Phil Gagliardi, BC Minister of Highways, 1955 (Dawson, 2004, p.190)

A burst of post-war spending began in 1946, and although short-lived, was supported by steady government investment in marketing throughout the 1950s. As tourism grew in BC, however, so did competition for US dollars from Mexico, the Caribbean, and Europe. The decade that followed saw an emphasis on promoting BC’s history, its “Britishness,” and a commodification of Aboriginal culture. The BCGTB began marketing efforts to extend the travel season, encouraging travel in September, prime fishing season. It also tried to push visitors to specific areas, including the Lower Fraser Valley, the Okanagan-Fraser Canyon Loop, and the Kamloops-Cariboo region (Dawson, 2004).

In 1954, Vancouver hosted the British Empire Games, investing in the construction of Empire Stadium. A few years later, an increased emphasis on events and convention business saw the Greater Vancouver Tourist Association change its name in 1962 to the Greater Vancouver Visitors and Convention Bureau (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2009).

The ski industry was also on the rise: in 1961, the lodge and chairlift on Tod Mountain (now Sun Peaks) opened, and Whistler followed suit five years later (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2009). Ski partners became pioneers of collaborative marketing in the province with the foundation of the Ski Marketing Advisory Committee (SMAC) supported by Tod Mountain and Big White, evolving into today’s Canada’s West Ski Area Association (Magnes, 2010). This pioneer spirit was evident across the ski sector: the entire sport of heliskiing was invented by Hans Gosmer of BC’s Canadian Mountain Holidays, and today the province holds 90% of the world’s heliskiing market share (McLeish, 2014).

The concept of collaboration extended throughout the province as innovative funding structures saw the cost of marketing programs shared between government and industry in BC. These programs were distributed through regional channels (originally eight regions in the province), and considered “the most constructive and forward looking plan of its kind in Canada” (Dawson 2004, p.194).

Tourism in BC continued to grow through the 1970s. In 1971, the Hotel Room Tax Act was introduced, allowing for a 5% tax to be collected on room nights with the funds collected to be put toward marketing and development. By 1978, construction had begun on Whistler Village, with Blackcomb Mountain opening two years later (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2009). Funding programs in the late 1970s and early 1980s such as the Canada BC Tourism Agreement (CBCTA) and Travel Industry Development Subsidiary Agreement (TIDSA) allowed communities to invest in projects that would make them more attractive tourism destinations. In the mountain community of Kimberley, for instance, the following improvements were implemented through a $3.1 million forgivable loan: a new road to the ski resort, a covered tennis court, a mountain lodge, an alpine slide, and nine more holes for the golf course (e-Know, 2011).

Around the same time, the “Super, Natural British Columbia” brand was introduced, and a formal bid was approved for Vancouver to host a fair then known as Transpo 86 (later Expo 86). Tourism in the province was about to truly take off.

Expo 86 and Beyond

By the time the world fair Expo 86 came to a close in October 1986, it had played host to 20,111,578 guests. Infrastructure developments, including rapid rail, airport improvements, a new trade and convention centre at Canada Place (with a cruise ship terminal), and hotel construction, had positioned the city and the province for further growth (PricewaterhouseCooopers, 2009). The construction and opening of the Coquihalla Highway through to 1990 enhanced the travel experience and reduced travel times to vast sections of the province (Magnes, 2010).

Take a Closer Look: The Value of Tourism

Tourism Vancouver Island, with the support of many partners, has created a website that directly addresses the value of tourism in the region. The site looks at the economics of tourism, social benefits of tourism, and a “what’s your role?” feature that helps users understand where they fit in. Explore the Tourism Vancouver Island website : http://valueoftourism.ca/.

By 2000, Vancouver International Airport (YVR) was named number one in the world by the International Air Transport Association’s survey of international passengers. Five years later, the airport welcomed a record 16.4 million passengers (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2009).

Going for Gold

In 2003, the International Olympic Committee named Vancouver/Whistler as the host city for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. Infrastructure development followed, including the expansion of the Sea-to-Sky Highway, the creation of Vancouver Convention Centre West, and the construction of the Canada Line, a rapid transport line connecting the airport with the city’s downtown.

As BC prepared to host the Games, its international reputation continued to grow. Vancouver was voted “Best City in the Americas” by Condé Nast Traveller magazine three years in a row. Kelowna was named “Best Canadian Golf City” by Canada’s largest golf magazine, and BC was named the “Best Golf Destination in North America” by the International Association of Golf Tour Operators. Kamloops, known as Canada’s Tournament City, hosted over 100 sports tournaments that same year, and nearby Sun Peaks Resort was named the “Best Family Resort in North America” by the Great Skiing and Snowboarding Guide in 2008 (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2009).

By the time the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games took place, over 80 participating countries, 6,000 athletes, and 3 billion viewers put British Columbia on centre stage.

Spotlight On: Destination British Columbia

Destination BC is a Crown corporation founded in November 2012 by the Government of British Columbia. Its mandate includes marketing the province as a tourist destination (at home and around the world), promoting the development and growth of the industry, providing advice and recommendations to the tourism minister on related matters, and enhancing public awareness of tourism and its economic value to British Columbia (Province of British Columbia, 2013b).

Tourism in BC Today

Building on the momentum generated by hosting the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, tourism in BC remains big business. In 2012, the industry generated $13.5 billion in revenue.

The provincial industry is made up of over 18,000 businesses, the majority of which are SMEs (small to medium enterprises), and together they employ approximately 127,300 people (Tourism Industry Association of BC, 2014). It may surprise you to learn that in British Columbia, tourism provides more jobs than high tech, oil and gas, mining, and forestry (Porges, 2014).

Spotlight On: The Tourism Industry Association of BC

Founded in 1993 as the Council of Tourism Associations, today the Tourism Industry Association of BC (TIABC) is a not-for-profit trade association comprising members from private sector tourism businesses, industry associations, and destination marketing organizations (DMOs). Its goal is to ensure the best working environment for a competitive tourism industry. It hosts industry networking events and engages in advocacy efforts as “the voice of the BC tourism industry.” Students are encouraged to join TIABC to take advantage of their connections and receive a discount at numerous industry events. For more information, visit the Tourism Industry Association of BC’s website : http://www.tiabc.ca/student-membership

One of the challenges for BC’s tourism industry, it has long been argued, is fragmentation. Back in September 1933, an article in the Victoria Daily Times argued for more coordination across organizations in order to capitalize on what they saw as Canada’s “largest dividend payer” (Dawson, 2004). Today, more than 80 years later, you will often hear BC tourism professionals say the same thing.

On the other hand, some experts believe that the industry is simply a model of diversity, acknowledging that tourism is a compilation of a multitude of businesses, services, organizations, and communities. They see the ways in which these components are working together toward success, rather than focusing on friction between the groups.

Many communities are placing a renewed focus on educating the general public and other businesses about the value of tourism and the ways in which stakeholders work together. The following case study highlights this in more detail:

Take a Closer Look: Tourism Pays in Richmond, BC

The community of Richmond, BC, brings to life the far-reaching positive economic effects of tourism in action. Watch the short video called “Tourism Pays” to see what we mean!: http://vimeo.com/31624689

Throughout the rest of this textbook, you’ll have a chance to learn more about the history and current outlook for tourism in BC, with in-depth coverage of some of the triumphs and challenges we’ve faced as an industry. You will also learn about the Canadian and global contexts of the tourism industry’s development.

As we’ve seen in this chapter, tourism is a complex set of industries including accommodation, recreation and entertainment, food and beverage services, transportation, and travel services. It encompasses domestic, inbound, and outbound travel for business, leisure, or other purposes. And because of this large scope, tourism development requires participation from all walks of life, including private business, governmental agencies, educational institutions, communities, and citizens.

Recognizing the diverse nature of the industry and the significant contributions tourism makes toward economic and social value for British Columbians is important. There remains a great deal of work to better educate members of the tourism industry, other sectors, and the public about the ways tourism contributes to our province.

Given this opportunity for greater awareness, it is hoped that students like you will help share this information as you learn more about the sector. So let’s begin our exploration in Chapter 2 with a closer look at a critical sector: transportation.

• British Columbia Government Travel Bureau ( BCGTB) : the first recognized provincial government organization responsible for the tourism marketing of British Columbia
• Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) : a national railway company widely regarded as establishing tourism in Canada and BC in the late 1800s and early 1900s
• Destination BC: the provincial destination marketing organization (DMO) responsible for tourism marketing and development in BC, formerly known as Tourism BC
• Destination Canada: the national government Crown corporation responsible for marketing Canada abroad, formerly known as the Canadian Tourism Commission (CTC)
• Destination marketing organization (DMO):  also known as a destination management organization; includes national tourism boards, state/provincial tourism offices, and community convention and visitor bureaus
• Diversity: a term used by some in the industry to describe the makeup of the industry in a positive way; acknowledging that tourism is a diverse compilation of a multitude of businesses, services, organizations, and communities
• Fragmentation: a phenomenon observed by some industry insiders whereby the tourism industry is unable to work together toward common marketing and lobbying (policy-setting) objectives
• Hospitality:  the accommodations and food and beverage industry groupings
• North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) : a way to group tourism activities based on similarities in business practices, primarily used for statistical analysis
• Tourism:  the business of attracting and serving the needs of people travelling and staying outside their home communities for business and pleasure
• Tourism Industry Association of BC ( TIABC) : a membership-based advocacy group formerly known as the Council of Tourism Associations of BC (COTA)
• Tourism Industry Association of Canada (TIAC): the national industry advocacy group
• Tourist:  someone who travels at least 80 kilometres from his or her home for at least 24 hours, for business or pleasure or other reasons; can be further classified as domestic, inbound, or outbound
• United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) : UN agency responsible for promoting responsible, sustainable, and universally accessible tourism worldwide
• List the three types of tourist and provide an example of each.
• What is the UNWTO? Visit its website, and name one recent project or study the organization has undertaken.
• List the five industry groups according to the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). Using your  understanding of tourism as an industry, create your own definition and classification of tourism. What did you add? What did you take out? Why?
• In 2011, how much money was generated by tourism worldwide? What percentage of this money was collected in Europe? Where was the least amount of money collected?
• According to UNEP, what are the four types of negative environmental tourism impact? For each of these, list an example in your own community.
• What major transportation developments gave rise to the tourism industry in Canada?
• Historically, what percentage of international visitors to Canada are from the United States? Why is this an important issue today?
• Name three key events in the history of BC tourism that resonate with you. Why do you find these events of interest?
• Watch the video in the “Take a Closer Look” feature on Richmond. Now think about the value of tourism in your community. How might this be communicated to local residents? List two ways you will contribute to communicating the value of tourism this semester. 
• Choose one article or document from the reference list below and read it in detail. Report back to the class about what you’ve learned.

Case Study: Tourism – Canada’s Surprise Blind Spot

In a 2014 episode of the Voice of Canadian Business , the Canadian Chamber of Commerce’s podcast, host Mary Anne Carter sat down with Greg Klassen, the CTC’s president and CEO, and Michele Saran, executive director of Business Events Canada. Their discussion highlighted the reasons Canada is struggling to remain competitive within the sector, and underscores the role and impact Canada’s tourism industry has on the economy.Listen to the 14-minute podcast on tourism in Canada and answer the following questions: www.chamber.ca/media/pictures-videos/140407-podcast-tourism/

• Why are governments around the world starting to invest in tourism infrastructure? What does this mean for the competitive environment for Canada’s tourism product?
• How do we compare to the United States as a destination for business travel?
• According to Greg, why is the $200 million investment in Brand USA a “double-edged sword” for tourism in Canada? What is beneficial about this? Why does it make things more difficult?
• What is the relationship between tourism and people’s understanding of a country’s image?
• What ranking is Canada’s brand? What other industries are affected by this brand?
• Describe one activity the CTC participates in to sell Canadian tourism product abroad.
• Name two “sectors of excellence” for Canada. Why is the CTC focussing their business events sales strategies on these industries?
• What does the CTC consider to be the benefits of Vancouver hosting the 2014 and 2015 TED conferences?

Brewster Travel Canada. (2014). About Us – Brewster History . Retrieved from http://www.brewster.ca/corporate/about-brewster/brewster-history/

British Columbia Ministry of Jobs, Tourism and Skills Training . (2013a). BC Stats: Industry Classification . Retrieved from http://www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca/StatisticsBySubject/BusinessIndustry/IndustryClassification.aspx

British Columbia Ministry of Jobs, Tourism and Skills Training. (2013b). Bill 3 – 2013: Destination BC Corp Act . Retrieved from https://www.leg.bc.ca/39th5th/1st_read/gov03-1.htm

Canadian Geographic . (2000, September). Flying through time: Canadian aviation history . Retrieved from http://www.canadiangeographic.ca/magazine/so00/aviation_history.asp

Canadian Tourism Commission. (2014). About the CTC. Retrieved from http://en-corporate.canada.travel/about-ctc

Chaney, Edward. (2000). The evolution of the grand tour: Anglo-Italian cultural relations since the Renaissance . Portland OR: Routledge.

Cox & Kings. (2014). About us – History. Retrieved from http://www.coxandkings.co.uk/aboutus-history

Dawson, Michael. (2004). Selling British Columbia: Tourism and consumer culture, 1890-1970 . Vancouver, BC: UBC Press.

Discover Hospitality. (2015). What is hospitality? Retrieved from http://discoverhospitality.com.au/what-is-hospitality/

e-Know. (2011, November). Ogilvie’s past in lock step with last 50 years of Kimberley’s history. Retrieved from www.e-know.ca/news/ogilvie’s-past-in-lock-step-with-last-50-years-of-kimberley’s-history/

Expedia, Inc. (2013). Expedia: Annual report 2013. [PDF] Retrieved from http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/EXPE/3546131959x0x750253/48AF365A-F894-4E9C-8F4A-8AB11FEE8D2A/EXPE_2013_Annual_Report.PDF

Flightglobal. (2002). Sixty years of the jet age. Retrieved from http://www.flightglobal.com/features/jet-age/

Globe and Mail, The. (2014, March 28). Ten things you don’t know about Air Canada. Retrieved from http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/travel/travel-news/10-things-you-likely-dont-know-about-air-canada/article17725796/?page=all

Government of Canada. (2006). Building a national tourism strategy. [PDF] Retrieved from https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/034.nsf/vwapj/tourism_e.pdf/$FILE/tourism_e.pdf

Government of Canada. (2013, July 5). Appendix E: Tourism industries in the human resource module . Retrieved from http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/13-604-m/2013072/appe-anne-eng.htm

Griffiths, Ralph, Griffiths, G. E. (1772). Pennant’s tour in Scotland in 1769. The Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal XLVI : 150 . Retrieved from Google Books . 

Gyr, Ueli. (2010, December 3). The history of tourism: Structures on the path to modernity. European History Online (EHO). Retrieved from http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/europe-on-the-road/the-history-of-tourism

Latin definition for hospes, hospitis. (2014).In Latdict – Latin Dictionary and Grammar Resources .  Retrieved from http://www.latin-dictionary.net/definition/22344/hospes-hospitis

Library and Archives Canada. (n.d.). Ties that bind: Essay.   A brief history of railways in Canada.  Retrieved from http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/trains/021006-1000-e.html

LinkBC. (2008). Transforming communities through tourism: A handbook for community tourism champions. [PDF] Retrieved from http://linkbc.ca/siteFiles/85/files/TCTT.pdf

MacEachern, A. (2012, August 17). Goin’ down the road: The story of the first cross-Canada car trip. The Globe and Mail . Retrieved from http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/goin-down-the-road-the-story-of-the-first-cross-canada-car-trip/article4487425/

McLeish. (2014, July 23). History of heliskiing in Canada. Retrieved from www.lastfrontierheli.com/news/1607/history-of-heliskiing-in-canada/

Magnes, W. (2010, May 26). The evolution of British Columbia’s tourism regions: 1970-2010 [PDF] . Retrieved from http://linkbc.ca/siteFiles/85/files/LinkBCMagnesPaper2011.pdf

Porges, R. (2014, September). Tell me something I don’t know: Promoting the value of tourism. Tourism Drives the Provincial Economy . Presentation hosted by the Tourism Industry Association of BC, Vancouver, BC.

PricewaterhouseCooopers, LLC. (2009). Opportunity BC 2020: Tourism sector. [PDF] Prepared for the BC Business Council. Retrieved from http://www.bcbc.com/content/558/2020_200910_Mansfield_Tourism.pdf

Shoalts, A. (2011, April). How our national parks evolved: From Grey Owl to Chrétien and beyond, 100 years of Parks Canada.   Canadian Geographic . Retrieved from http://www.canadiangeographic.ca/magazine/apr11/national_parks_evolution.asp

Theobald, William F. (1998).  Global Tourism (2nd ed.). Oxford, England: Butterworth–Heinemann, pp. 6-7.

Thomas Cook Group of Companies. (2014). Thomas Cook history. Retrieved from http://www.thomascook.com/thomas-cook-history/

Tourism Industry Association of BC. (2014). Value of tourism toolkit: Why focus on the value of tourism?  Retrieved from http://www.tiabc.ca/value-of-tourism-toolkit

Tourism Industry Association of Canada. (2014, October 14). Travel industry poised to boost Canadian exports: US market and border efficiencies central to growth potential . Retrieved from http://tiac.travel/cgi/page.cgi/_zine.html/TopStories/Travel_Industry_Poised_to_Boost_Canadian_Exports_US_Market_and_Border_Efficiencies_Central_to_Growth_Potential

Tourism Industry Association of Canada, HLT Advisory. (2012). The Canadian tourism industry: A special report [PDF] . Retrieved from http://www.hlta.ca/reports/The_Canadian_Tourism_Industry_-_A_Special_Report_Web_Optimized_.pdf

United Nations and World Tourism Organization. (1995). Recommendations on tourism statistics. [PDF] Retrieved from http://unstats.un.org/unsd/newsletter/unsd_workshops/tourism/st_esa_stat_ser_M_83.pdf

United Nations Environment Programme. (2003a). Negatives Socio-cultural impacts from tourism . Retrieved from http://www.unep.org/resourceefficiency/Business/SectoralActivities/Tourism/FactsandFiguresaboutTourism/ImpactsofTourism/Socio-CulturalImpacts/NegativeSocio-CulturalImpactsFromTourism/tabid/78781/Default.aspx

United Nations Environment Programme. (2003b). Tourism’s three main impact areas. Retrieved from http://www.unep.org/resourceefficiency/Business/SectoralActivities/Tourism/TheTourismandEnvironmentProgramme/FactsandFiguresaboutTourism/ImpactsofTourism/EnvironmentalImpacts/TourismsThreeMainImpactAreas/tabid/78776/Default.aspx

United Nations World Tourism Organization. (2008). Understanding tourism: Basic glossary . Retrieved from http://media.unwto.org/en/content/understanding-tourism-basic-glossary

United Nations World Tourism Organization. (2012, May 7). International tourism receipts surpass US$ 1 trillion in 2011. Retrieved from http://media.unwto.org/en/press-release/2012-05-07/international-tourism-receipts-surpass-us-1-trillion-2011

United Nations World Tourism Organization. (2014a). UNWTO world tourism barometer, 12 [PDF] (1). Retrieved from http://dtxtq4w60xqpw.cloudfront.net/sites/all/files/pdf/unwto_barom14_04_august_excerpt_0.pdf

United Nations World Tourism Organization. (2014b). Who we are. Retrieved from http://www2.unwto.org/content/who-we-are-0

Attributions

Figure 1.1  Selkirk College and Nelson  by LinkBC  is used under a  CC-BY 2.0  license.

Figure 1.2   Capilano University’s Team   by LinkBC  is used under a  CC-BY 2.0  license.

Figure 1.3   Vancouver Island University   by LinkBC  is used under a  CC-BY 2.0  license.

Figure 1.4  Canadian Pacific 4-4-0 A-2-m No 136  by  Peter Broster  is used under a  CC-BY 2.0  license.

Figure 1.5   Vancouver Island University   by LinkBC  is used under a  CC-BY 2.0  license.

Figure 1.6   Switzerland vs. Canada   by s.yume  is used under a  CC-BY 2.0  license.

Figure 1.7   CTC’s Boardroom   by LinkBC  is used under a  CC-BY 2.0  license.

Introduction to Tourism and Hospitality in BC Copyright © 2015 by Capilano University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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A Brief History of Travel and Tourism

Utilizing the widest definition of the word, human beings have been travelling since the dawn of time. No matter one’s beliefs about the creation of humans, everyone can agree our species began in some single locale, likely Africa or the Middle East , and ‘travelled’ outwards, settling new lands. However, most of this ‘travel’ was done out of necessity and war, often without the intent of return. It wouldn’t be until Antiquity, or the glory days of the Greek and Roman empires, that tourism, or leisure travel, would be introduced.

Aristocratic Tourism

In those days, tourism was a privilege almost entirely confined to the wealthy, who travelled largely for cultural exploration. One has to remember, the Greek and Roman upper classes were people who prided themselves on artistic, scientific, and philosophical pursuits. It follows, then, that these early travellers largely sought to learn the arts, languages, and cultures of their destinations.

Soon enough, travelling for leisure’s sake began to gain popularity; from the Roman Empire arises some of the earliest examples of travel resorts and spas in the world. Though they documented their experiences most thoroughly, the elite Europeans were not the only ones travelling in ancient times. In eastern Asia , it was popular for nobles to travel across the countryside for the religious and cultural experience it offered, oftentimes stopping at temples and sacred sites during their travels.

Religious Tourism

During the Middle Ages, travel took on a new meaning. Although leisurely travel was still reserved for the upper class, it became more and more common for members of the upper and even lower classes to embark on pilgrimages. Most of the major religions at the time, including the Islamic, Judaic, and Christian traditions, encouraged their practitioners to conduct pilgrimages.

Largely unaided by technology, most of these journeys were done on foot, often occasionally with a beast of burden to carry supplies. The wealthy were able to afford other forms of travel including horseback and ship. Furthermore, the Middle Ages saw the emergence of connected shipping routes. As ports grew, travel opportunities increased, and the dock was typically the start of any long-distance travel during the Middle Ages.

The Grand Tour

Travel continued to exist in this way for some time: the rich travelled primarily for cultural and leisure reasons, while the poor travelled largely for religious reasons, if at all. The next major development travel underwent was the establishment of the Grand Tour. Undertaken by the elite men of Western and Northern European countries , the Grand Tour took young travellers across Europe in a “rite of passage” meant to educate the wealthy after they finished their education but before adulthood. Historians cite this tradition as the origin of the modern tourism industry and indicate that the tradition had become well established in European culture by the 1660s.

Like many traditions, the Grand Tour eventually developed a rigid structure. Tourists were expected to follow a set itinerary and travelled with a tutor. The Grand Tour typically began in England, moved south through France into Switzerland and Italy. After spending a few months in Italy, the traveller and his tutor moved upwards through Germany and into Holland before returning to England. These trips utilized the most advanced travel technology of the day, including ships and collapsable coaches, and it wasn’t entirely uncommon for the traveller and tutor to be waited on by a handful of servants.

Tourism For The Masses

The Grand Tour remained a popular cultural phenomenon amongst the rich until the 1840s, which saw the advent of the first widespread railway system across system Europe. Immediately, this innovation opened the possibility of embarking on a Grand Tour to the middle classes, and soon it became more popular for middle and even working-class citizens to travel for leisure.

More importantly, the implementation of railway systems across Europe and the United States positioned the world for the Industrial Revolution. The United Kingdom is often cited as the first country to actively promote leisure time to its industrial class, and as a result, the country had a strong impact on the early development of the tourism industry. One hugely influential player in the history of travel and tourism was Englishmen Thomas Cook, who established the first-ever travel agency to provide ‘inclusive individual travel’ in the 1840s.

This means that travellers move independently in their travels, but all the food, lodging, and travel expenses were set at a fixed price for a predetermined length of time. This allowed travellers to take any route they fancied throughout Europe without having to ascertain food or lodging ahead of time. This fact, coupled with the falling ticket prices of railways, meant that long-distance travel was dramatically cheaper and faster than ever before. This not only further lowered the barriers to leisure travel but also drastically increased the incidences of business-related travel. As one can imagine, Cook’s Tours became massively popular, and the company remains successful today as the Thomas Cook Group.

In short, the introduction of a widespread railway system gifted a massive boost to the tourism industry; this boon would largely reflect that the aeroplane would have in the early-20th century. More so than any other technological development, the aeroplane opened the floodgates of mass international tourism. Behemoth multinational airlines such as Pan Am, Delta, and American Airlines arose during the 1900s, and suddenly the physical boundaries between cities were rendered useless. It has become possible for a traveller to get nearly anywhere on the globe in less than 48 hours, for a price that most middle and working-class members can achieve.

Today, travel stands as one of the most economically important leisure activities in the world. The tourism market is so large that it has split into an astounding number of niche markets, including ecotourism , backpacking, and historical tourism. As of the writing of this article, there have even been a handful of trips into orbit around Earth branded as “space tourism”, a new and exciting chapter in the history of travel and tourism. The story of tourism displays a remarkable connection to the technology that makes travel possible. Transportation innovations like the train and aeroplane have eliminated the difficulties and lowered the costs of long-distance travel, and planet Earth has truly become a smaller place because of it.

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History, tourism

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History as a discipline has long traditions going back to the ancient time . Its writing has changed from chronicles and data collection into a multiple and continuously mutating field of studying human experiences throughout diverse times and places. Because of their important role in explaining the contemporary world, historical studies are widely debated among academics and laymen. Even if the discipline appears to address only humans, the natural world often plays an important role in its studies. History not only refers to the past but also to the academic discipline and various other ways of capturing and presenting the past.

What presently is called modern history writing was established during the 1800s. This raises a question about the timing of the publication of the first scholarly studies on the history of tourism or travel . By the late nineteenth century, a number of minor studies had already been published about pilgrimages as well as about travel literature in the West....

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Black, J. 1997 The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century. Stroud: Sutton.

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Kostiainen, A., and T. Syrjämaa, eds. 2008 Touring the Past: Uses of History in Tourism. Discussion and Working Papers No. 6. Savonlinna: Finnish University Network for Tourism Studies.

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Department of European and World History, University of Turku, 20014, Turku, Finland

Auvo Kostiainen

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Correspondence to Auvo Kostiainen .

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Honggen Xiao

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Kostiainen, A. (2014). History, tourism. In: Jafari, J., Xiao, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Tourism. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01669-6_265-1

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Published : 12 September 2015

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How “Dark Tourism” Warps Our Understanding of History

Hasanthika sirisena on the commodification of war.

Civil War battle site tourism, tourism to visit World War I and World War II battlefields, visits to Auschwitz all fall under the category of war tourism. In other words, visitors who never lived through the war—or most likely any war—pay money to go to a site and be accompanied by a tour guide—if at all possible a survivor able to provide a firsthand account. War tourism has a long history. Scholars John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, in a work published in 2000, accorded this type of tourism a more sinister appellation—dark tourism. Dark tourism is a broader category that includes tours to former sites of any type of catastrophe, natural or man-mad. In The Darker Side of Travel , Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone define dark tourism this way: “the act of travel to sites associated with death, suffering, and the seeming macabre.”

War tourists don’t limit their travels to places in which conflict is a thing of the past. A destination tour website in the UK happily touts that tourism to Afghanistan has increased 100 percent and tourism to Iraqi Kurdistan, it appears, has increased by 70 percent.

The question is what attracts visitors to such sites. Sharpley and Stone offer a few reasons. Visitors may be drawn by “a simple morbid curiosity, through schadenfreude, by a collective sense of identity or survival ‘in the face of violent disruptions of collective life routines.’” Novelty, the desire to participate in your own adventure narrative, and nostalgia are also posited as potential reasons. A voyeuristic impulse is a motivator. Grief plays a role.

It’s true that there’s a huge divide between visiting Antietam on a Saturday afternoon and paying thousands of dollars to travel to Aleppo. But, according to Sharpley and Stone, what characterizes all war tourism is an emphasis on extreme otherness. The contrivances of Disney World and Las Vegas are designed for the tourist’s comfort and enjoyment, but the dark tourist site promises an “authentic” brush with death, grief, mayhem, murder. And the experience promises to be transformative: the dark tourist goes from passive bystander and mere consumer of history to witness, with all the uniqueness and privilege that being a witness affords in this culture.

Expertly curated sites such as Auschwitz and Gettysburg National Military Park exist on the same continuum as the war tours conducted in the former Yugoslavia or in Sri Lanka. The dictum “Never Again” coexists uneasily with a thirst for the morbid. Perhaps the only true measure of how tasteful a war tourism site is, then, is the amount of time that has passed since the main event. Any tourist who trespasses that line too soon risks being haunted by a sense of their own rapaciousness. As Alfred Ely, one of the original Civil War dark tourists writes in his memoir, “Among other things, I found that to visit battlefields as a mere pastime, or with the view of gratifying a panting curiosity, or for the sake of listening to the roar of shotted artillery, and the shrill music of flying shells (which motives however were not exactly mine) is neither a safe thing in itself, nor a justifiable use of the passion which Americans are said to possess for public spectacle.”

My cousin and my friends have spent their entire lives in the middle of a war. They are either divorced or unmarried and none of them have children. In fact, of the whole group of friends only a handful is married. This gives them a lot of freedom to travel—they’ve traveled all over the world—and a great deal of disposable income. In the 90s, the government claimed that Sri Lanka’s universities—many of them of very high quality and well-respected throughout the world—were hotbeds of political agitation and shut them down. Many college-aged students left the country to attend university overseas and, because of the political situation, never returned.

It seems to me that men were more able to leave than women since women were expected to shoulder the burden of caring for their parents. These women who remained have done well—become bankers, lawyers, journalists, politicians. My cousin and my friends are successful, but you can hear in the way they speak a sense of loss, a sense of something important being missed, and occasionally of bitterness.

For most of the journey to the North of Sri Lanka the A9 was paved, but as we drew closer we hit rough patches—places where the road was heavily pitted or even parts that had never been properly paved. The government had recently committed itself to repairing the A9 as part of a massive development project in the North and had received most of its funding from China. Part of the conditions of the funding—or so the newspapers reported—was that the government use Chinese workers. As we drove we saw tents shielding helmeted Chinese road workers from the sun as they sipped at teacups. Every thirty miles or so, we were stopped at a checkpoint or passed an army regiment bivouacked at a point in the distance. Any sense that the LTTE had ever patrolled the A9 had disappeared.

The landscape of northern Sri Lanka is very different from that of the southern region. Most of Sri Lanka is verdant, green, lush with jungle vegetation. But Jaffna appears vast and flat—all hard clay and limestone dotted by the tree that is the symbol of the region, the Palmyra, a tall palm with a thin trunk topped by a crest of palm fronds that make it look a little like a giant green and brown Q-tip. The houses are often painted bold shades—blue, pink, apricot, as if to defy the monotone earth tones of the surrounding terrain. Candy-striped stucco walls mark a Hindu shrine or temple.

Sri Lankans in the South can be dismissive of the Jaffna landscape, refer to it as ugly. Whereas the landscapes of the South are jammed-packed with people, cars, animals, and billboards, the landscapes of the North emanate the rugged, off putting barrenness we associate with deserts. Leonard Woolf served as an administrator in Jaffna for several years. He wrote of Jaffna in his memoir Growing: “Here again is one of those featureless plains the beauty of which is only revealed to you after you have lived with it long enough to be absorbed into its melancholy solitude and immensity.”

As we drew closer to Kilinochchi, once the seat of the LTTE, the yellow caution tape marked in English, Sinhala, and Tamil with the word MINE became ubiquitous. We passed at another point female villagers—deminers—decked out in white helmets and visors kneeling hunched forward so they could examine the ground. (The CEO of one of the NGOs involved in demining operations in the North and Northeast informed me that the NGOs who recruit these women are very careful to ensure their safety. She was very proud of the fact that up to the point I spoke to her, no civilian deminer had been killed.)

The mood in the van shifted. We listened to ABBA and Eagles on the way, and we didn’t stop the music, but my friends began to share their memories of the war. One friend recounted how during the university shutdowns she’d lied to her parents and snuck into movie theaters during the day. “I’d sit there and feel terrible,” she admitted. “I thought, what if the theater was bombed and I was killed. My parents would know I had been going with boys.”

When we arrived at our first stop, an army jeep drew up next to us, and soldiers hopped out. What I hadn’t expected, and what makes the war tour I participated in Sri Lanka unusual, was that our tour was almost entirely coordinated by the Sri Lanka Army Security Forces headquartered in the area. Essentially, soldiers became our tour guides. Most were officers, though a few were infantrymen. My cousin and my friends decided that I shouldn’t speak much—we didn’t want to invite any inquiries into where I was from or have them ask for my papers and that I shouldn’t take notes, at least not during the tour itself. I resolved not to draw attention to myself. I can’t say I wasn’t frightened—we were dealing with soldiers after all— but it did seem to me that the soldiers were cowed by the presence of six affluent, well-dressed, women from Colombo. They were many of them garrulous, effusive with information, and shared at every moment possible insights into their lives during the war.

The sites that the soldiers escorted us to were caught in some halfway stage between what they had once been and a stop in an almost theme-park-like series of attractions. The army had, I was very surprised to see, erected signs in both English and Sinhala (but not Tamil). The signs were not written in the well-researched, semi-academic prose that you associate with markers at most historic sites. Instead the signs touted carefully worded propaganda meant to exalt the military and to remind the viewers—the Sri Lanka Armed Forces clearly expected the viewers to be mostly foreigners and Sinhalese—of the terrible deeds the LTTE committed.

At a swimming pool used to train LTTE divers, the signage read: “While the nation was swarming with pools of blood with the spate of LTTE’s heinous crimes elsewhere, the terrorist had constructed this huge swimming pool in 2001 for exclusive use of the cream of terrorists.” Over two days, the Security Forces escorted us to bunkers used by LTTE leaders, a makeshift war museum exhibiting LTTE weaponry, an LTTE village, an LTTE junkyard, even restricted areas of Mullaitivu including Puthumathalan, which was the site of some of the heaviest fighting in the final days of the war.

At an LTTE prison, the soldiers led us to the empty prison cells. They told us this secret prison in the middle of the jungle was where the Tigers had held Sri Lanka Armed Forces soldiers and Tamils whom the Tigers considered traitors. The steel doors of most of the cells had been removed and the doorways, all placed at regular intervals, stood empty, six long slivers of darkness, stark against the egg-carton-gray prison walls. A large margosa tree arced over the building on one side. Behind the prison, a stretch of red clay dirt bloomed where the grass had begun to die away. A miasma of clay dust, kicked up by our van and the army jeeps that escorted us to the prison, hung in the air. The landscape shimmered behind it, slightly distorted, like objects viewed through a scrim. It was early afternoon, and the sun had begun to bear down, searing the skin on the back of my neck. Between the two buildings was a long trench now overgrown with grass. The soldiers told us that during heavy shelling the LTTE made the prisoners shelter inside the trenches.

The soldiers urged us to take pictures. One soldier gestured to me to follow him, and I did. He led me to a cell and demanded I step inside. The cell was narrow, barely four feet in width, and there was just enough room for me and another friend who had joined me when the soldier began to lead me away.

The soldier waited outside the cell as my friend and I entered. He yelled to us that most of the Tamils kept in the prison were Christian. This was only our first day of our war tour, but I already felt depressed, scared by the presence of so many soldiers, and overwhelmed. The cell was dark, except for a small window on the far end covered with bars. The outline of some sort of ledge was barely visible underneath. I didn’t try to explore it. I was sorry to be standing there at all.

On the wall spread a chalk drawing of an enormous tree, the branches and leaves curving and intertwining together to form an intricate network of abstract shapes. There was also writing in Tamil that none of us, my friend, the soldier, or me, could read, and a series of numbers. My friend asked the soldier what the numbers meant. He shrugged because he either didn’t know or didn’t care. “It’s a calendar,” I replied.

The Sri Lanka Army’s motives, at the time we arrived, might not have been entirely triumphal. General Sarath Fonseka, one of the architects of the campaign that had ended the civil war, had been arrested a few months before on charges of corruption. The feeling among the army was that the arrest was unjust and politically motivated—Sarath Fonseka had attempted to run against the president in 2009. Many of the officers and soldiers must have also been aware of some of the war crimes allegations being leveled against them by the Western press, Tamil journalists and politicians, and even some members of the Colombo elite. These war crimes allegations included bombings of civilian targets and genocidal rape.

One of the many stops on our war tour was the former LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran’s bunker. The soldiers ushered us into the first level—a spare room with a cot to one side. The mattress had been stripped bare and the fabric was stained brown with sweat and age. Over the bed hung a framed portrait of Prabhakaran in camouflage standing next to the LTTE flag. On a far wall rested a garment rack; a neatly pressed and folded combat uniform hung from one of the rungs. In the corner, on a cushioned bench, sat a large, stuffed toy cheetah. The walls had been painted a light blue, paint chips peeling from the wall. The room was lit with a single light bulb. The air tasted heavy on the tongue and faintly bitter.

Whoever had designed this room had reconstituted it to resemble one of those “this-is-how-they-lived” displays you find in museums, with only the velvet rope barrier missing. But there existed a sparse—haphazard—feel to the whole creation that put me off a bit, as if a child had pieced it all together. My cousins and my friends walked around snapping pictures.

After we had spent ten minutes in what appeared to be Prabhakaran’s bedroom the soldier led us down a rickety staircase to a bottom level. According to the soldiers, the entire bunker was multiple stories and included secret passageways that would provide Prabhakaran escape if necessary. The one level we were shown was dark, lit by a faint bulb strung from the ceiling. I couldn’t see much of anything except that there appeared to be a lot of wood and metal on the ground. The concrete walls secreted an intestinal ooze that glistened in the half light. By then I could barely follow the soldier’s Sinhala and couldn’t make out my cousin or any of my friends in the dark. A military engineer—a good friend of one of the women on the tour with me—had joined us, and he offered a few facts in English—dimensions and information of what the room had been used for originally. He called it a war room.

When we came back up, I noticed an object sitting on what I assumed was once Prabhakaran’s bedside table. It was metal, the dimensions of a crock-pot. I asked my friend to ask a soldier what it was. He shook his head at her question. My friend offered that perhaps it was for developing film canisters, though that didn’t seem right to me. I had studied photography in art school. I did know enough to recognize it was mostly likely some sort of centrifuge. In the van, I drew up a quick sketch of the object. When I returned to Colombo I determined, through some research on the Internet, what it really was—a centrifuge used for plasma separation. Prabhakaran, a diabetic, would have needed to be able to get accurate medical results if he spent a long time in the bunker. I don’t know why but the centrifuge stays with me.

__________________________________

Dark Tourist: Essays by Hasanthika Sirisena is available via Mad Creek Books.

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Definition of historical

Did you know.

historic or historical ?

Do you experience a slight pause before using either of these words as you try to remember which one is correct and whether it should be preceded by an or a ? If so, you’re not alone, for many people find this pair particularly tricky. Historic and historical are both occasionally found preceded by an , since the initial h in each word was formerly left unpronounced. Now this h is heard, and a is far more common than an (by a ratio of about 4 to 1 in American English).

Historic and historical have been used interchangeably by many writers, even in recent years. If you would like to avoid being corrected, however, use historical for matters relating to history (the historical society ), and historic to refer to things having great and lasting importance (a historic occasion).

• documentary
• matter-of-fact
• nonfictional

Examples of historical in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'historical.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

15th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1a

Phrases Containing historical

• anti - historical
• art historical
• historical materialism
• historical museum
• historical present
• historical society

Articles Related to historical

What's the difference between...

What's the difference between 'historic' and 'historical'?

And should you use 'a' or 'an' before each one?

Dictionary Entries Near historical

historical cost

Cite this Entry

“Historical.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/historical. Accessed 10 Jun. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of historical, more from merriam-webster on historical.

Nglish: Translation of historical for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of historical for Arabic Speakers

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• HISTORY & CULTURE

Spring cleaning has ancient origins. Here’s why we still do it.

While the specific customs and practices may vary across cultures, the underlying themes of purification, preparation for new beginnings, and the celebration of spring’s arrival remain central to this enduring tradition.

As the Northern Hemisphere ushers in the new season , a contagious urge to dust off cobwebs and toss out clutter emerges. Spring cleaning, a deep cleanse of one’s home, is a tradition ingrained in societies worldwide, with roots tracing back to ancient times.

It also holds symbolic significance. Viewed as a fresh start, the tradition symbolizes the transition from the dormant winter season to the vibrant growth of spring. By purging the home of accumulated debris and organizing its contents, individuals create a cleaner living environment and a sense of mental clarity and freshness.

“With each sweep of the broom and polish of the surface, we honor a tradition that transcends time, uniting us with generations past in a shared pursuit of renewal and rejuvenation,” says Danielle Patten, director of creative programs and collections at the Museum of the Home in London .

Benefits of spring cleaning

Human behavior is greatly influenced by the cycles of nature. In the colder months, we have less energy to spare for chores such as deep cleaning. We’re not being lazy; limited daylight triggers the hormone melatonin , which makes us sleepy.  

“Melatonin causes us to feel less inclined to refresh our space. When the seasons start to shift, feelings of sluggishness reduce, and we regain energy and feel inspired to deep clean our living environments,” says author and psychotherapist Eloise Skinner . “When we refresh our environments, we can feel a sense of new beginning, or a renewed sense of drive and ambition.”

Studies have also shown that cleaning can be therapeutic , as seen by the new generation of “ cleanfluencers ” taking social media by storm. Millions of people watch them scour filthy homes and dole out cleaning hacks.

( Here are simple ways to make your laundry routine more eco-friendly .)

“When we’re cleaning, we often have to be present to the task at hand, and this can bring us into the present moment causing us to feel more aware, engaged and observant. The repetitive nature can also be soothing,” Skinner says.

Religious and cultural origins  

One of the earliest known references to spring cleaning is found in the Jewish tradition of Passover , which is observed annually in March or April. People remove all traces of chametz or leavened bread, which is prohibited leading up to the holiday. Its removal symbolizes the haste with which the Israelites fled Egypt , unable to wait for their bread to rise before their journey to freedom.

Similarly, Catholics clean altars in churches on Maundy Thursday ahead of Good Friday , which is held annually in the spring in March or April. Nowruz , celebrated around the vernal equinox in March, involves the tradition called khāne-takānī or “shaking down the house.” People wash clothes, blankets, and textiles in preparation for this approximately 3,000-year-old holiday—which can be traced back to Zoroastrianism, one of the world’s first monotheistic religions.

Before the Lunar New Year , it’s common to cleanse the home of bad luck and misfortune in China . Known as “sweeping the dust,” cleaning makes way for the new year’s good luck and prosperity, says Patten. Cleaning must be done before the holiday, typically in January or February, since sweeping after the festivities is seen as removing good luck. In Thailand , during Songkran in April, it’s customary to deep clean homes, schools, and public spaces to purify them ahead of the Thai New Year. People toss water at each other in the streets to wash away the previous year’s bad luck and over statues of Buddha to ensure luck for the year to come.

( “ Wash your hands” was once controversial medical advice .)

While the concept of spring cleaning predates modern technology, advancements such as electricity and household appliances have influenced its practice. For example, before electric lights, people relied on fire from burning coal, oil, and wood to light and heat homes, which would leave behind a substantial amount of soot. Windows were kept securely closed to prevent a deadly draft from entering.  

Come spring, it was pragmatic to open the windows to air out stuffy homes, remove grime, and repair any damages that occurred during the winter months. Inventions such as vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and cleaning agents have made the process more efficient and convenient, allowing for deeper and more thorough cleaning of living spaces.

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