Tourism & Arts: An enduring convergence

Resumo

This special issue publishes a collection of seven original research papers and one research note on tourism and art in its multiple forms and intersections. To reflect on the association between tourism and arts is to acknowledge that these two fields have converged since the embryonic forms of tourism. Even before the organisation of the tourism industry as we know it nowadays, travellers visited destinations in search of art in its multiple shapes. This activity has evolved into cultural tourism and its ever-expanding sub-niches: literary tourism, religious tourism, heritage tourism, food and wine tourism, and street art tourism, among others, that human creativity and tourism stakeholders have fashioned. Curiosity and the desire to learn and understand are fundamental elements of human nature, and tourism has organised access to art as a strategy to meet visitors' needs and expectations and to take art as a place-changing phenomenon.