Tourist Neoreadings of Heritage in Local and Transnational Contexts

Tourism is a worldwide phenomenon which is causing both a rereading and a rewriting of tradition. Heritage, apart from its academic (ethnographic, historiographical, etc.) or cultural (identity of peoples) consideration, is nowadays an important tourist resource. Thus, it is included within more global markets and it also becomes the engine of local, regional and national development of communities. This supposes a reconceptualisation of cultural goods according to mechanisms which this paper describes with the support of determined paradigms (interpretative communication, ecocriticism, etc.), and also according to studies of explanatory cases, such as the intangibles of water culture and the way in which its legends have been displayed in order to catch the attention of visitors.