Heritage is one of the great flags of contemporary times and tourism is a tentacular phenomenon of the global society to which the 21st century is heir.

 

Cultural motivation makes many tourists travel to places that once belonged to European empires in order to experience their hybrid heritage. Hence colonial heritage tourism enables people to enjoy not only leisure travel but also historical knowledge spanning many centuries providing a privileged access route to empowerment between visitors and hosts.

 

As tourism is a phenomenon on a global scale and has a fundamental weight in national GDPs, the dialogue between recreational travel and the safeguarding of a discursive resource whose reinterpretations and reappropriations reflect the current political power has shown itself to have a fragile and volatile balance. A legacy subject to strategies of transition, adaptation, maintenance and/or reformulation, colonial heritage is a means of building culture and defining identities, an enabler of the integration of tourism into history, becoming part of it and a powerful element of multilateral cooperation and alliance between countries with a temporarily common past.

 

This is a subject of great debate among peers and so the aim is to produce a corpus of critical knowledge with an impact on tourist practices, thus responding to a societal challenge that leverages citizen science, resilience and effective alterity.