Abstract
In the current media context, heavily influenced by information and communication technologies, tourism destinations have a need to promote the most outstanding aspects of their cultures to attract the visitors who stimulate their economies. Websites are one of the tools available to carry out this task and they must be designed to communicate the destinations’ heritages persuasively to a worldwide audience. Taking these premises into consideration, the objective of this research is to analyze the cultural heritage content on Portugal’s municipal websites. The specific goals are to classify the most recurrent heritage elements and detect how they frame identity based on the ‘local-global dialectic’. The results show that the heritage discourse is built on the selection of certain aspects—namely, culinary and architectural assets—which are emphasized through the combined use of local and national frames that strengthen the municipalities’ particular values but also the fact that they are integrated into a broader and unified whole: Portugal.
Highlights
The dynamics between culture, heritage and tourism have inspired a very large number of theoretical reflections and empirical studies [1]
A substantive or qualitative interpretation of the quantitative results allows us to state that the main element of Portuguese cultural heritage, widely promoted across the municipal websites, is gastronomy
Gastronomy serves as a cornerstone for tourism, acting as bait for foreign visitors coming to the destination, seduced by its wide range of flavors, and for locals
Summary
The dynamics between culture, heritage and tourism have inspired a very large number of theoretical reflections and empirical studies [1]. The latest trends explore the use and impact of information and communication technologies [2,3] in these cross-cutting areas Such is the case of social networks [4,5,6,7], e-WOM [8], applications for mobile devices [9,10], big data [11,12], virtual and augmented reality [13,14] and video games [15,16]. The Bank of Portugal indicates that tourism revenue in the country amounted to €12.68 billion in 2016 [22], which represents 9.2% of Portugal’s GDP and national employment [23]
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