Festab - The Patrimonialization and Touristification Process of the Trays Festival in Tomar

• Autor(a) principal: Pires da Silva, Cláudia
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Pinto Coelho, João, Camponês, André, Marques, C. G., Dionísio, Marta
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.26/50130
• topic: safeguarding; enhancing; patrimonialization; Trays Festival; tourism

The manifestations of the Intangible Cultural Heritage are an integral part of daily life, internalized in the individuals and groups that traditionally preserve them according to their own ways of enhancing and safeguarding. According to the participatory perspective, defended by the UNESCO Convention (2003), the importance given to the temporal and evolutionary complexity of cultural manifestations considers: the dynamic dimension of the past - the historical value and the fact that the manifestation “is transmitted generationally” - while it also enhances the contemporary nature of the event, i.e the fact that the heritage “is alive”. This approach, promoted with greater impact from the 1980s onwards, defends a holistic and democratic procedure in the definition of what is cultural heritage. In turn, the heritage touristification process, as a resource to these assets and manifestations by the tourism activity to transform them into consumable products and experiences, is an unquestionable and borderless reality that naturally reached the Trays Festival in Tomar. The Trays Festival, which takes place in the city of Tomar every four years and receives about half a million visitors in a city with about 20 thousand inhabitants, presents a unique model in the framework of the so-called Festivities in Honour of the Divine Spirit. The distinctive elements that attest to this specificity are related to the format of the offers, the Trays, which represent the payment of promises to the Divine, constituting one of its central symbolic aspects. Assuming the historical and conceptual framework of the patrimonializaon process of the Trays Festival as the main objective of the study, documentary analysis and participant observation were used for data collection. This article also aims to contribute to enhancing the role of intangible cultural heritage in society. This study results from the development of the first milestone contemplated in the project “The Trays Festival, the Cultural Heritage and the Community” (FesTab).