Literary Walking Tour

Rita Baleiro (ESGHT – University of the Algarve, CiTUR, Portugal)

A literary walking tour consists of a thematic map of reading a space, which can be guided or self-guided, and a site-specific itinerary comprising a coherent sequence of significant literary places that spatially link texts, authors, and visitors through landscapes with which literary heritage is directly or indirectly associated. Literary walking tours are grounded in the niche of literary tourism and organise “the visitor experience by providing a purposeful, interpreted route” (MacLeod, Hayes & Slater, 2009, p. 156). They typically integrate writers’ biographical sites (birthplaces, tombs, homes, haunts), settings of scenes of literary texts, the trail of a fictional literary character and commemorative markers (statues, plaques), often balancing informative accuracy with narrative coherence, leisure and visitor flow (e.g., on-site static gaze directions, such as “in front of you” and “to the left” and mobile directions, such as “turn right” and “walk past the…”) (de Certeau, [1980] 1988, p. 119).

Literary walking tours emerged gradually from the convergence of two older practices: literary pilgrimage and pedestrian travel. The earliest organised form of literary tourism is commonly traced to David Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769 in Stratford-upon-Avon, an event that turned the dramatist’s birthplace into a destination for devotees (Ruiz-Morgan, 2022). Although the eighteenth century saw this phenomenon take shape, it was in Britain between roughly 1810 and 1850 that readers began to seek out, in a more sustained way, the places associated with celebrated authors and their works (Robinson & Andersen, 2002), and the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would mark its heyday (Ruiz-Morgan, 2022). In parallel, walking was itself being redefined. In the Romantic era, walking came to be reimagined as a valued cultural and aesthetic practice rather than a mere necessity, which gave rise to a wave of pedestrian touring from the late eighteenth century onwards.

Currently, literary walking tours are tourist and cultural products, a form of heritage performance and a territorial narrative device, in which visitors are active participants rather than mere spectators. As such, they are an interpretative practice that translates literary heritage into spatial experience and contributes to the construction of a literary landscape and a literary cartographic representation, as places gain meaning through connections to writers’ lives, creative processes and fictional settings. They may be performed by interpreter-guides as mediators and storytellers and are co-produced by moving audiences who seek experiences ranging from homage to interpretative learning and entertainment. They can also be self-guided when the visitors have access to texts or other interpretive material that enable them to follow the route independently (MacLeod, Hayes & Slater, 2009).

In a literary walking tour, attention is paid to how a person moves from one place to the next, which brings the reader/visitor into the space. Thus, literary walking tours operate at the intersection of performance (Edensor, 2001), heritage interpretation and place-making. In them, the interpreter-guides’ voice, pace, narrative, and selected markers or the content of the interpretative materials that visitors selected when taking a self-guided tour translate literary geographies into an embodied experience, strategically curating information through processes of emphasis and omission (Robinson & Andersen, 2002). They curate the tourist gaze, and in this context, the permanent and reciprocal interaction between representation and experience suggests that place is not only a location, but also a process (Weston, 2016).

Hence, from a mobilities perspective, literary walking tours engage the tourist gaze and its contemporary extensions (e.g., apps, photography, online space digitalisation), inviting a choreography of looking, listening, and dwelling that is irreducibly embodied. It is a performance that visually and imaginatively works upon space (Urry & Larsen, 2011, p. 110), co-producing the literary landscape (resulting from the selection and editing of markers in the space), rather than a mere visual experience (i.e., sightseeing), because it involves other senses and bodily experiences: touch, smell, and hearing.

In short, three defining features can be identified in literary walking tours. The first is that they are a form of heritage interpretation, an experience fostered by narrative (i.e., “knowledge structures that consist of a sequence of thematically and temporally related events”, Adaval & Wyer, 1998) and theme (i.e., “the main point or idea a communicator is trying to convey about that topic”, Ham, 2013). The second is that they are mediated performances of space and story, delivered by interpreter-guides, trail information, or other interpretive route materials. Within this interpretative-performative frame, curated intertextual relationships (author, text, place) mobilise storytelling techniques to enhance interpretive effectiveness (activating sensory cues to make the narrative more vivid, providing narrative-based guidance, and citing). The third feature of literary walking tours is mobility and embodiment. Hinging on movement at walking pace, literary walking tours convert the space into a legible narrative landscape through which participants co-produce meaning. In these tours, and as previously stated, participants walk, pause, and look, enacting an embodied hermeneutics in which sensory cues (soundscapes, smells, and noises) and kinesthetics (pace, pausing, effort) recalibrate literary interpretation.

When guided by the elements in the text, the tours co-create a landscape of literary representations that act as “travelling objects, at once informational and material [becoming] dynamic vehicles for the circulation of place through space and time” (Urry & Larsen, 2011, pp. 110-111). Hence, in this perspective, the written literary text can be understood as a visual medium rather than a non-visual one, as it encompasses images in its words (cfr. Imagination is “a place inhabited by images”, Elkins, 1996, p. 224).

While the tourist gaze selectively frames sites, guided by plaques, apps, maps and commentary that translate texts and writers’ biographies into spatial sequences, sometimes privileging authorial biographical episodes and other literary settings, literary walking tours accumulate educational aims to their interpretative and heritage pursuits, as well as respond to market demands and destination branding strategies. Research (Ingram et al., 2021) suggests these experiences address both special‑interest readers and broader visitor segments, with motivations varying by familiarity with the text or author; implications that shape product design and messaging.

As cultural economy tools, literary walking tours can revitalise neighbourhoods, benefit local communities and create literary tourism destinations, which may, at times, raise issues of authenticity, representation and the extent to which texts and lives become walkable. They also participate in destination branding and cultural economies, often reproducing canons and celebrity authorship, even as they open opportunities for counternarratives and non-canonical literature. They also advance environmental and tangible heritage conservation, improve visitor management, and stimulate local economic activity, while fostering a more holistic and stronger sense of place.

This work is financed by national funds through FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology, IP., under the Project CiTURUID/04470/2025. Doi.org/10.54499/UID/04470/2025

How to cite this entry: Baleiro, R. (2026). Literary Walking Tour. In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.), E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University of the Algarve. https://doi.org/10.34623/zdg2-hn59

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Ingram, C., Themistocleous, C., Rickly, J.A. & McCabe, S. (2021). Marketing ‘Literary England’ beyond the special interest tourist. Annals of Tourism Research Empirical Insights, 2, 100018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annale.2021.100018

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