Heritage Tourism

By Lia Daskalopoulos

“What are you doing here? Go to Mykonos, have a cocktail and take some selfies for Instagram. Don’t come here, and don’t bring any more tourists here with you.”

An old man sat down next to me and my three friends in a small town in the Greek region of the Peloponnese, and told us this after a brief conversation. All of us grew up in Northern Europe, but our parents or grandparents are from the Peloponnese. Don’t tell me I don’t belong in the region when my surname is Daskalopoulos. At the same time, I barely speak any Greek, so how could I consider myself local? If you’ve got parents from different countries, you know the drill. Wherever you are, you are told that you’re the other ‘half’ of your heritage. 

Heritage tourism around the globe has been growing significantly over the past few years, with the market size estimated at around 604 billion USD in 2024, according to Grand View Research. The growth can be attributed to rising interests in cultural preservation and travelers wanting to connect with history, traditions and cultural heritage. Heritage tourism is defined as “the practice of traveling abroad to places of historical or cultural interest” by the Oxford dictionary, but many tourists see it as a way to piece together a cultural identity. A 2023 study by researchers in Fudan University showed that cultural heritage tourism to China directly strengthened a positive cultural identity among Chinese youth overseas.

This form of tourism is a key aspect of Ireland’s tourism industry, expressed in a 2013 speech by Redmond O’Donoghue, former chairman of Failte Ireland. “Yes, of course they will book a hotel when they are in Ireland, and they will eat and drink in our restaurants and bars. But these are not reasons people come to Ireland. Our research shows that people come to Ireland with an expectation of connecting with different aspects of our heritage.” With almost 10% of the U.S. population being of Irish descent in a statistic published by Forbes, it makes sense that Americans are the second largest group of visitors to Ireland, according to Tourism Ireland.

A lot of people go on heritage journeys to reimagine their identity, whether it is Americans visiting Ireland to connect with their ancestral roots, Australians coming to the Netherlands to map out their family tree or young people from all over the world going on Birthright trips to Israel. Furthermore for being “one of the most effective propaganda campaigns on behalf of the Israeli government and its occupation of Palestinian territories” by Jewish Currents.

Everyone I’ve spoken to about visiting the land of their heritage says that they’ve learned more about their parents’ cultures and have been able to connect better with them. I can relate to this, since my visits to Greece bring back a lot of childhood memories, deepen my connection with my family, and it’s nice being in a place where people know how to pronounce my surname. 

For many, visiting their country of heritage can help them reconceptualize a sense of cultural identity, and bring comfort in knowing that there is a homeland where significant aspects of their identity stem from. It can also bring feelings of disorientation, since you don’t have the same sense of belonging to the place as those who were born there. However, a wise friend once told me that for people like us, home isn’t a place, but it’s the people you surround yourself with. Hearing that brought me a lot of comfort.