Living Heritage As a Cultural Tourism Asset: Reflections From The Déjì's Royal Palace

Cultural tourism is often offered through monuments, museums, and carefully preserved historical sites. Some sites, however, have their significance more dependent on their age or architectural grandeur than on their place in the mainstream of culturally built forms. Déjì’s Royal Palace in Akure, southwestern Nigeria, is one such area. According to this view, the best asset of the palace for cultural tourism is not just in its most effective physical material but in its function as a historical setting in which traditional architecture, art expressions, royal institutions, and communal traditions remain vibrant additions to life. Based on increasing conversations in important and intangible heritage scholarship, this viewpoint proposes that managers of the African cultural heritage should treat sites not just as static monuments, but as cultural landscapes whose meanings are constantly renewed through use.

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Uploaded on Sep 14, 2026, 8:06:13 PM

Living HeritageCultural TourismPalace ArchitectureMonuments

Notes

This is a subjective viewpoint but a worthy read for architects, urban cultural planners, heritage and tourism scholars. The work is relevant because it pushes back against the standard model of cultural tourism, which tends to prioritize monumental scale, age, or architectural grandeur (think pyramids, cathedrals, and UNESCO-listed buildings). By using Déjì's Palace as a case where significance comes from living function rather than physical spectacle, the paper contributes to the "intangible heritage" literature, arguing that a site's value lies in ongoing practice, not just preserved form.

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