Tourism as a heritage producing machine

Abstract The purpose of this document is to analyze the role that tourism has historically played and still plays today in the emergence and affirmation of the modern concept of heritage. It particularly looks to highlight the operational co-production of heritage and tourism and shows that tourism has never worked better, faster and more efficiently as a heritage-producing machine than in this beginning of the 21st century. We are on the threshold of a new “heritage regime”, which presents a gap compared with the one that produced the major European national heritages in the State-Nations of the 19th century. The tourism system (tourism actors, places and businesses as well as tourists themselves) contribute to the production of a new heritage system (heritage places, practices and actors) which functions according to its own needs and expectations, in a world of free traffic, transactions and generalized mobilities.