TOURISM RESEARCH IN A CHANGING WORLD
Editors: Francisco Dias, Joanna Kosmaczewska, Ewa Dziedzic and Antonio Magliulo ISBN: 978-989-98965-0-5
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Title: Tourism Research in a Changing World Edited by Francisco Dias Joanna Kosmaczewska Ewa Dziedzic Antonio Magliulo
Copyright © GITUR – Tourism Research Group of Polytechnic Institute of Leiria ISBN: 978-989-98965-0-5
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First published in Portugal in 2014 by Tourism Research Group of Polytechnic Institute of Leiria
TOURISM RESEARCH IN A CHANGING WORLD | 97
CHAPTER 1.5.
THE WEDDING IN HEIDELBERG, GERMANY, FROM A HISTORICAL REENACTMENT TO A CULURAL TOURIST ATTRACTION?
Vítor Ferreira and Norberto Santos University of Coimbra, Portugal Abstract: The city of Heidelberg, in Germany, had celebrated on the 9th-11th August 2013 the Wedding of the Prince Elector Friedrich V of the Palatinate with the English princess Elisabeth Stuart. This was an event that intended to celebrate the 400th Anniversary of this marriage that toke place on February 14th 1613, and was planned in order to involve the community, highlight the cultural heritage sites of the city, but also to be able to attract cultural tourists. The need for differentiation and the struggle for the affirmation of the territories, led them to bet on major events and temmatization as strategies to achieve visibility, but also to attract cultural tourists. The institutional authorities in Heidelberg have also followed this strategy in what concerns the mentioned event. With this article it is intended to understand what were the results of this event regarding the impact it had in the community, as well as the results concerning its capacity to attract visitors. Through literature review and semi-structured interviews, we expect to trace the design of the event, understand the pretended results, and to hear the opinion of different stakeholder, such as institutional authorities and neighborhood associations, among others, from the city and form the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg. The evaluation of the event‘s scope should be done as a Press review of the impact in local and national newspapers. As a preliminary result, we concluded that the massification and indifferentiation of the tourist products available, as in this case and in this particular territory, announce the bankruptcy of this tourism model and that the opportunity to integrate and create identification through the different communities in Heidelberg was worthless, due to a lack of communication and cooperation between the different structures. Keywords: Heidelberg; Historical Reenactment; Events; Cultural Tourism; Results
INTRODUCTION
