Tangible Cultural Heritage and Tourism: Pressures, Authenticity and Sustainable Management

Abstract

Tangible cultural heritage, such as monuments, historic towns and archaeological sites, remains a core resource of cultural tourism, yet the relationship between the two is contested. This article reviews how recent literature positions tangible heritage within cultural tourism, what effects tourism is reported to have on heritage sites, and which management approaches are proposed to balance conservation and visitor use. It applies a structured literature review with thematic content analysis to a purposive corpus of ten sources published between 1988 and 2025. Three findings emerge. First, tangible heritage remains the traditional core of cultural tourism but is increasingly framed alongside intangible, everyday and creative forms of culture. Second, the evidence on tourism's effects is mixed: World Heritage status shows inconsistent effects on visitor flows, while overcrowding, commodification and contested authenticity recur as concerns. Third, proposed solutions centre on visitor-capacity management, spatial redistribution, technology, co-creation and ex post evaluation. The study is exploratory: the corpus is small, several sources were read at abstract level, and no primary data were collected.