Peripheral nightscapes: music ecosystem, territorial imaginaries and rural geographies in Valencia’s Ruta del Bakalao (1978–1995)

This paper examines the Ruta del Bakalao (1978–1995) as a case of rural and peri-urban place-making driven by a music ecosystem in the periphery of Valencia, Spain. While research on music, tourism and place has focused on urban centres and planned destinations, this study explores how informal cultural production transformed agricultural landscapes and secondary roads into a significant node of European electronic music culture. Drawing on historical-documentary analysis, oral histories, press archives and spatial reconstruction, it analyses how cultural actors, mobility practices and regulatory ambiguity produced territorial imaginaries of modernity and nightlife. The findings show the “Ruta” functioned as a dispersed cultural system generating tourism-like effects and later heritage-making. The paper contributes to debates on place-based tourism and rural cultural geographies.