ABSTRACT

The purpose of this chapter is to examine fado, a Portuguese song form, as a popular culture expression associated with the identity of the city of Lisbon, capital of Portugal. Simultaneously, we intend to present an exploratory research on the role of fado in the tourist experience in Lisbon, particularly of young Portuguese tourists. In order to achieve this purpose, we begin by presenting the theoretical framework mainly associated with the conceptualization of popular culture and the tourist experience of the city. In this context, we acknowledge culture as a very complex concept (Wendy, 2012) that encompasses different types of culture, such as ‘high culture’, ‘popular culture’ or ‘everyday culture’. Particularly, we discuss the concept of ‘popular culture’ (Delaney, 2007; Shuker, 2016) and the importance of cultural tourism experiences in the context of the economy of experience (Pine & Gilmore, 1999). In terms of methodology, we adopt a case study approach that links fado as an expression of popular culture with Lisbon as a tourist city. Additionally, we conducted a survey among young people and the open-ended questions were analyzed using categorical content analysis, following Bardin (2015). Finally, we present and discuss the results and the concluding remarks.