Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the visitors' experience at the Castel National site. Tough battles took place there during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The site's renewal left this fact vague and flexible to allow all the visitors to “connect” to the place during their visit and have a good time.

Paper long abstract:

his study is based on an ethnographic research that took place at the Castel National Site, a “natural” area surrounded by buildings, located at the center of Israel, during the years 2016–2017. We want to argue that Israel Nature and Parks Authority (INPA) shaped the Castel, where tough battles between Jews and Arabs took place before the state of Israel was established, in a way that the story of the site is vague, flexible and for some of the visitors even meaningless, in order to make it possible for all the visitors to “connect” to the place during their visit and enjoy it. Even the nature dimension in the site stays vague since the visitors found it hard to notice which elements were natural and which were man-made. Nevertheless, the flattening of the story that enables a wide audience to visit the site, created a sterilized experience that is not very attractive for part of the visitors and they refer to it as “nice”.

Difficulties in finding appropriate metrics for evaluating the quality of the site and the success of the employees and the manager, led to an unfortunate miss. The number of visitors – referred to as site entrance numbers, became unintentionally the main index of evaluation, giving little attention to the purpose or quality of the visit. The need to increase the number of visitors made the conflict between preserving nature and providing accessibility to visitors even stronger.