Holy Week in Spain: Negotiating Meanings in Tourism Contexts

What is known as religious tourism has experienced spectacular growth in Spain in recent years. To highlight some aspects of the relationship between tourism and religious practices during Holy Week, this paper describes some occurrences involving processions and itineraries, understanding these itineraries to be social ways of creating symbolic spaces within the city layout. The paper analyses the case of a mature coastal tourist destinations in Southern Spain. There is general agreement among scholars that tourism produces commodification either through the commercialisation of culture by way of its recreation and inclusion in the category ‘heritage’ or through the invention of a tradition and / or spectacularization of specific cultural manifestations such as Holy Week. However, this paper reveals another reality that, due to the predominance of ideas of commercialisation and authenticity in the social sciences discourse, this type of activity often does not receive the attention it deserves. The participant observation in this work shows the persistence of personal, intimate and contemplative ways of experiencing religion or popular Catholicism even in tourism contexts. Far from the more theatrical versions of brotherhood and scenography in tourism territories, the simple everyday forms of religiosity are still prevalent in more hidden corners, where visitors and tourists do not go