The right to remain: touristification, social sustainability and the governance of living heritage in Cádiz

Abstract

This paper examines how a flagship living-heritage festival is governed under touristification pressures and what this means for the social sustainability of a mature urban destination.

Design/methodology/approach The study uses a qualitative case study of the Cádiz Carnival during the 2025 festival cycle. It combines participant observation, 10 semi-structured interviews with actors in the carnival field, and critical discourse analysis of a focal corpus of eight carnival group repertoires.

Findings The findings show how heritage recognition, tourism visibility and spatial regulation intersect around participation, access to public space and residentiality. Five recurring tensions structure this governance: safeguarding and intergenerational transmission; professionalisation and mediated legitimacy; tourism-driven pressures on mobility, crowding and housing; the vernacular work of critique and symbolic boundary-making in song lyrics; and contested imaginaries of the festival's future. Carnival lyrics function as vernacular public commentary and as a feedback infrastructure for destination governance, making everyday inequalities legible and linking tourism growth to resident liveability.

Practical implications The paper suggests that safeguarding intangible cultural heritage in tourist cities requires governance approaches that connect heritage policy with public-space management, housing pressures and everyday urban infrastructures.

Social implications The social sustainability of living heritage depends on protecting residents' capacity to remain, participate and reproduce cultural practices in place.

Originality/value The paper shifts debate beyond authenticity by showing that the key issue is the set of urban, residential and participatory conditions that sustain living heritage under touristification. It also advances the analysis of carnival lyrics as a situated vernacular corpus through which communities publicly narrate, evaluate and contest tourism-led urban change.