BLOG · GUIDE

What is literary tourism?

3-MINUTE READ

Some books make you want to travel. To see with your own eyes the places that appear in their pages. Others make you want to know more about the person who created the story you loved so much.

Perhaps after reading Dolores Redondo's Baztán Trilogy you've felt the urge to visit Elizondo. Or you've pictured yourself searching the streets of Barcelona for the Cemetery of Forgotten Books after reading The Shadow of the Wind. Maybe you'd like to explore the Cartagena of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Nautical Chart, see the house where Cervantes was born or visit some of the places linked to Lorca's life.

But it can also happen the other way round.

You might be travelling and end up doing literary tourism almost without meaning to: walking into a hundred-year-old bookshop, discovering a spectacular library, stumbling on a book fair or finding out that the café you've just sat down in was once a meeting place for writers.

That's exactly what makes it interesting: literature can be the reason for the trip, or a new way of looking at the place you're already in.

In a nutshell, literary tourism means travelling to or discovering places through their connection with books and their authors. Sometimes because they appear in a story. Sometimes because someone lived or wrote there. And sometimes because literature is part of the place's identity.

One of the most widely used definitions in studies of literary tourism places it within cultural tourism and links it especially to places connected with works of fiction and with authors' lives.

But in practice it can cover quite a lot more.

Much more than visiting places from novels

For a long time, literary tourism has been associated mainly with the settings of literary works and with places linked to writers' lives.

And they're still a fundamental part of it.

But a destination's literary heritage can be much broader.

A city can be full of stories: authors who were born or lived there, novels set in its streets, house museums, plaques, statues, libraries, bookshops, cafés, festivals or traditions connected with literature.

That's why, at TurismoLiterario.com, we use the term in a broad sense.

We're interested in the places that appear in books and the spaces connected with the people who wrote them, but also in anything that lets us discover a destination through its relationship with literature.

Why travel with books as your guide?

Because reading changes the way we look at places.

You can walk down a street knowing nothing about it and find nothing special there. But what happens if you discover that's where the main characters of a novel you love first met?

Suddenly, and forever, that street means something more.

The same thing happens when you recognise a landscape you'd imagined while reading, visit a writer's house or discover that a city is far more bound up with literature than you thought.

And you don't need to plan the whole trip around it.

You can visit museums, try the local food, spend an afternoon on the beach and, on top of all that, seek out the settings of a novel. Or it may be precisely a book, an author or a story that makes you choose that destination.

There's no single way to do literary tourism.

Nor do you need to know much about literature.

You just need to be curious.

So where do I start?

You can start with a book that's made you want to see a place. With an author you'd like to get to know better. Or simply by asking yourself what stories are hidden in the next destination you're going to visit.

Perhaps you'll find a route, a house museum, a special bookshop or a story you didn't know.

Sometimes the journey begins with a book.

And other times, it's the journey that leads you to your next read.

Looking for ideas and inspiration for your next literary trip?

You're in the right place.

Welcome, literary traveller.

Where to go next

Now you know what it is: choose your next trip

Like the sound of it? If you'd like to find out more, join the www.turismoliterario.com community and you'll be the first to hear about everything new we publish on the site.

See all destinations

Explore literary routes