Paper short abstract:

I present an insight into the spatial dimension of the State by focusing on how it becomes instantiated through specific public interventions in the field of tourism, therefore orchestrating and channelling a set of mobilities and practices through which the (touristic) space is socially produced.

Paper long abstract:

In this intervention I focus on touristic mobilities, significantly different from those of migrants or asylum seekers, mainly consisting in voluntary and circular displacements, temporal liminalities (Graburn, 1989; Jafari, 1987), oriented to pleasure. Based on a current research on the development of the Penedès region (Spain) as a wine tourism destination, grounded in a historical ethnography, I present an approximation to the role of the State (and its effects) in the production of the touristic circulation of bodies and their practices.

The Penedès' Tourism Promotion Consortium, born in 1998, led to the creation of the Wine Routes of Penedès; which have become a sort of ritualistic itineraries (Delgado, 2000; Graburn, 1989) that connect the cellars and other touristic infrastructures and attractions. Later, the region became part of a wider national strategy to de-concentrate and de-seasonalize tourism from Barcelona to lesser local and regional destinations. I suggest taking these kind of routes, and the national circuits to new touristic centres (Córdoba, 2020; Mansilla & Milano, 2019), as a specific form of State instantiation through which not only the tourists' bodies, but also its practices (visits, tastings, meals, activities and "experiences", etc.), are oriented and channelled.

This allows us to think on the spatialization of the State through public interventions, in the sense of: a) its existence in the space (crystallised in routes, indications, viewpoints, maps and guides…); and b) its conditioning of the practices and mobilities through which, following Lefebvre (2013, 1991), the (touristic) space is socially produced, represented and objectified.