Nazaré: From Coastal Cultural Landscape to Unique Tourism Branding

A notorious Portuguese filmmaker, Leitão de Barros, directed two films based on Nazaré’s fishing community. The first one, a documentary, Nazaré, praia de pescadores e praia de turismo (Nazaré: fishermen’s beach and tourism beach), announced the future practices of ethnographic fiction, already in 1929. It was also one of the first films recognizing the importance of tourism in Portugal. The second production, a feature film Maria do Mar (Mary from the sea), released in 1930, reinforced the previous cultural image of fishermen’s day-by-day hard work, alongside with sophisticated and cosmopolitan summer seaside activities, setting the tone for Nazaré’s depiction as a cultural landscape. Nowadays, this center region’s tourism destination (TD) presents itself as a unique selling proposition, emphasized by the 2011th world’s Guinness Record: the highest wave ever surfed. Focusing on these coastal imageries, this research’s main goal is to explore the connections, challenges and impacts between the 1930’s branding images of Nazaré to recent years, through a gradual strategic tourism branding. It is also our aim to acknowledge the importance of local and regional destination management organization (DMO) joint policies to push Nazaré as a sustainable unique destination. This research used an interdisciplinary qualitative methodology: (1) early film production visual analysis; (2) in-depth interviews to two of this region’s cultural and tourism key managers; (3) field trip. This research assessed the importance of collaborative governance policies to produce high value and sustainable branding TDs.