Conceptualising silence in heritage tourism: current discourses and future paths

Silence remains an underdeveloped concept in heritage tourism research, despite its centrality to how visitors sense, interpret and emotionally encounter heritage landscapes. Existing studies touch on silence as erasure, sensory stillness, spiritual practice, or ecological condition, but lack an integrated framework for understanding how silence acquires cultural meaning and managerial relevance. This conceptual paper addresses this gap by reflecting on insights from heritage studies, cultural geography, sensory anthropology, environmental psychology and poststructural theory to develop a unified analytical approach. We conceptualise silence based on three distinct yet interrelated modes: acoustic silence (quiet as sensory and ecological condition), curatorial silence (silence as interpretive and atmospheric practice) and political silence (silencing as power, omission and narrative control). Guided by three research questions, we show how silence shapes visitor experience across memorials, indigenous landscapes, rural environments, deserts and sacred sites; how tourism management practices produce tensions around quietness; and how silence becomes contested within heritage-making processes. We further analyse the structural absence of silence within UNESCO’s World Heritage governance, despite its experiential significance. To address this omission, we propose practical pathways for integrating silence into existing frameworks, including acoustic character statements, led quiet protocols and impact assessments.