Defensive architecture and heritage education: analysis of the National Park Service and Parks Canada actions

Abstract

Defensive architecture is a heritage typology of great interest for society due to various reasons, such as its monumentality, history, beauty or ability to fascinate thanks to cinema, literature or television. Like other cultural assets, its management is based on research, preservation, restoration, didactics, dissemination and participation following current approaches. In this sense, heritage education plays a fundamental role since it is a tool that connects cultural heritage with people. This fact becomes a key aspect to guarantee its knowledge, preservation, use and enjoyment over time. This paper will analyse the actions on heritage education of the National Park Service (United States of America) and Parks Canada which are focused on defensive architecture. Both offices have been chosen because they manage examples of defensive architecture and are world leaders in heritage education. Therefore, the main purpose is to know their actions and make proposals for the Spanish context. This is an interesting fact because Spain has a rich and varied defensive architecture but heritage education still has little presence, which is surprising because heritage education favours society commitment when preserving cultural heritage. To this end, the qualitative work methodology will be used, specifically the analysis technique applied to the contents of the National Park Service and Parks Canada web pages.