The look of the websites of tourist information offices of a lot of cities recently shows a new trend under the heading of city tours: walking tours on the trail of a novel, so-called literary trails. The city is explored following the trail of a fictional character. Tourist offices develop a route for visiting the settings of a novel and so bring the plot to life. In novels drawing intensely on history (such as “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown), historic sites become interlinked from a new perspective. Literary trails are initially an invention for tourists, unlike the tourist marketing of classical routes such as the Silk Road or the Way of St. James. However, tourists follow these trails like neo-pilgrims.
The circuit of culture by Hall can be used to describe these relationships. Heritage manifests itself not just in traditional local practices, but is also formed in the global space of discourses. Heritage as a traditional practice is encoded on specific local conditions. These encodings can be stabilized in global discourses (e.g. in discourses on the novel or the film version of the novel) but can be externalized as well. Externalized heritage is disembedded from its traditional framing; it has lost its original meaning. However, it becomes decoded under new conditions and is dynamized by tourist practices. The question is, which kind of reading turns out to be the dominant one for the heritage. The result is due to social forces backing up the articulation of different meanings and enforcing them.
The invention of literary trails can be considered from two different perspectives with regard to the city and its heritage, which should be discussed with the help of two spanish novels. On the one hand, a city gets the chance to promote its heritage in reference to the novel. This is especially true for cities like Valladolid, which are not hot spots on the map of international tourism. These cities consequently gain new marketing possibilities. Global discourses contribute stabilizing traditional encodings within the framework of a literary trail. On the other hand, this kind of marketing implies an intensified disneyfication of cityscapes and also a commodification of heritage. A new meaning is ascribed to cityscapes by way of a literarily implicated theming which orients itself, to a lesser extent, towards historical facts, and more to literary fiction. Discourses on “The Da Vinci Code” and the conspiracy theories contained within the book may substantiate this. In this case, heritage becomes externalized and the city’s history becomes a distory, a disneyfied history.