The right to remain: touristification, social sustainability and the governance of living heritage in Cádiz

Flagship festivals in tourist cities are not only cultural showcases; they are arenas where urban governance and sustainable tourism governance are tested. When events become destination brands, decisions about public space, crowd management and housing shape cultural participation: who can remain in central neighbourhoods, who can access the streets during peak periods and who can sustain the infrastructures that make the festival possible.

This shifts the focus from authenticity alone to distributive conflict. Debates about living heritage and commodification remain important, but they often under-specify a central sociological problem: how touristification reshapes cultural citizenship and everyday rights in the city. In mature destinations, crowding, public-space regulation and housing pressure can make participation itself an unequal and contested resource. What is still insufficiently understood is how these dynamics intersect in the everyday governance of flagship festivals that are simultaneously heritage practices and tourism assets.

Cádiz Carnival brings these tensions into sharp relief. It is supported through heritage governance (regional cataloguing and safeguarding instruments) and is also positioned as a key element of the city's tourism brand. This occurs in a context where tourism expansion, short-term rentals and saturation of central areas have become everyday concerns, and where the festival's centrality to local identity makes conflicts over access and residentiality highly visible.

Rather than treating Carnival as either a tradition or a product, this article approaches it as a living heritage arena in which community, commercial and institutional logics are continuously negotiated. Carnival songs are crucial here. Beyond entertainment, they operate as vernacular public commentary that records grievances, draws moral boundaries and offers shared interpretations of urban change.

The article makes three contributions. Theoretically, it connects living heritage governance with spatial justice and the right to remain, arguing that the social sustainability of intangible heritage in tourist cities depends not only on safeguarding cultural forms but also on protecting the residential, spatial and community conditions that make participation possible. Empirically, it examines Cádiz Carnival as a living heritage practice shaped by touristification, showing how tourism visibility, housing pressures and the regulation of public space affect the actors and places that sustain the festival. Methodologically, it treats carnival lyrics not as illustrative folklore or as decorative quotations, but as a situated vernacular corpus of public commentary through which urban change, commodification, displacement and belonging are collectively narrated, evaluated and contested.

The article pursues three objectives. First, it examines how heritage recognition and tourism promotion shape the conditions for participation and are evaluated by key actors in the carnival field. Second, it analyses how carnival lyrics represent touristification, inequality and the governance of public space. Third, it draws out implications for sustainable tourism governance in mature urban destinations, focusing on how participation, access and residentiality condition what safeguarding can mean in practice.

The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 sets out the analytical lens and reviews relevant scholarship. Section 3 explains the case study design, data production and analysis. Sections 4 and 5 present and interpret the findings through a set of themes that align with the results and discussion. Section 6 summarises the contributions, implications and limitations.

To guide the analysis, the study combines three strands of scholarship to examine how participation in a flagship urban festival is governed and unequally distributed under touristification pressures. First, work on intangible cultural heritage (ICH) emphasises that safeguarding is not primarily about protecting objects but about supporting living practices, relationships and meanings that communities recognise as their heritage (UNESCO, 2003; UNWTO, 2012). This perspective makes community participation and negotiated change central, while also recognising that listing and “recognition” can introduce new regimes of value, visibility and control that reshape agency and legitimacy (González Cambeiro, 2015; Quintero-Morón, 2022).

Second, scholarship on commodification and heritage tourism shows how living practices can be reorganised when they are reframed as attractions and circulated through event and media infrastructures. The “heritage” that visitors consume is not simply found but curated, staged and made legible through cultural packaging and mediated visibility (MacCannell, 1976; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998). This does not imply a linear “loss of authenticity”: communities can strategically negotiate display, professionalisation and income, and authenticity claims can be grounded in experience, emotion and belonging rather than in claims to purity (Wang, 1999; Shepherd, 2002; MacLeod, 2013).

Third, the paper treats spatial justice as the bridge that connects safeguarding and commodification to social sustainability concerns in mature tourism destinations. When festivals become destination brands, pressures on public space, mobility and housing can reconfigure participation itself: who can rehearse, meet, perform, access central streets or continue to live near the places where the festival is enacted. Recent critical work on urban tourism inequalities highlights that these conflicts are not peripheral “impacts” but constitutive of how cultural heritage is governed and distributed (Bianchi, 2003; Mínguez et al., 2019; Parralejo and Díaz-Parra, 2021; Milano et al., 2024a).

Bringing these strands together, the paper conceptualises Cádiz Carnival as a contested public practice structured by three interlinked tensions: first, safeguarding and heritage recognition; second, commodification and mediated visibility; and third, spatial conflicts over access and the right to remain. This lens informs both data production (attention to practices, discourses and spaces) and the organisation of findings (Section 4) and interpretation (Section 5).

Research on tourism and heritage has long noted that, since the mid-twentieth century, a growing proportion of travel has been oriented towards the consumption of cultural goods and practices, including performative expressions such as festivals and rituals marketed as distinctive experiences (Qiu et al., 2022; Esfehani and Albrecht, 2018; Aguado et al., 2024). In this context, the 2003 UNESCO Convention has helped consolidate ICH as a key policy language for framing the value of living practices and promoting safeguarding across governance scales (UNESCO, 2003; UNWTO, 2012). In Spain, this agenda has been associated with inventories, safeguarding plans and specific policy instruments, sometimes in tension with tourism strategies and the political economy of cultural promotion (González Cambeiro, 2015). Within Andalusia, festivals and musical practices have been positioned as resources for identity, memory and development, with initiatives combining safeguarding and promotional goals (Aoyama, 2009; López-Guzmán and Santa-Cruz, 2017; Quintero-Morón, 2022).

A central issue, however, is that recognition and tourism growth can reshape living practices by introducing new regimes of value, visibility and control. Classic accounts highlight that cultural experiences are curated, staged and mediated for consumption rather than “found” (MacCannell, 1976; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998). Later contributions complicate linear narratives of “authenticity loss” by showing how authenticity is negotiated and how meaningful experience may be grounded in emotion and embodied participation (Wang, 1999; Shepherd, 2002). Recent critical work continues to question assumptions of pre-touristic “purity” and stresses that authenticity claims often operate as moral and political boundary work in contested heritage settings (Rickly, 2022; Zhang et al., 2023).

For this article, the relevance of these debates is not primarily definitional but sociological: commodification is treated as a process that reorganises who can speak for the festival, who benefits from its visibility and which practices become legible and governable. Heritage can transform places and practices into “exhibits” for consumption (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998), while critical scholarship highlights the need to analyse the links between tourism, power and community, including the uneven distribution of costs and benefits in tourism-led development (Bianchi, 2003). Complementing this, the notion of cultural realignment captures how communities may reconfigure cultural representation and organisation for tourism, identity or political purposes, including through professionalisation and strategic self-presentation (MacLeod, 2013).

This argument also connects with recent event-sustainability scholarship, which cautions against treating sustainability as a matter of making individual events less harmful while neglecting how events contribute to, or undermine, wider sustainable development agendas (Mair and Smith, 2021). Recent work on social sustainability in music festivals also reinforces the need to examine festivals through their social effects, stakeholder relationships and local impacts rather than only through operational sustainability indicators (Siles et al., 2025). In the case of heritage festivals in tourist cities, this perspective links event sustainability to the broader urban agenda of making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable, particularly SDG 11 (United Nations, 2015). However, the SDGs are used here as a policy reference point rather than as the article's primary analytical framework.

Bakhtin's account of carnival has shaped reflection on carnival as a space of inversion where official hierarchies are temporarily suspended and popular laughter can contest authorised culture (Bakhtin, 1968). For this article, the value of this tradition is not to romanticise carnival as inherently liberating, but to treat it as a social arena where community boundaries, authority claims and collective interpretations of change become visible. Popular festivals are moments when meanings about the city, power and the future are publicly negotiated and performed (Scott, 1990; Sacaluga-Rodríguez, 2014; Valdivia Alonso, 2021).

In contemporary settings, carnival is best approached as a contested field. Critical and humorous repertoires can coexist with the reproduction of stereotypes and with unequal access to voice and visibility. Class, gender and political relations shape who can participate, who is recognised as representative, and whose criticisms circulate as legitimate (Ramos-Santana, 2002). This perspective aligns with the paper's focus on participation as an unequal resource: carnival practices unfold within urban conditions that affect rehearsal spaces, routes, access to central streets and the capacity of practitioners to remain embedded in the neighbourhoods where the festival is enacted.

For Cádiz, scholarship has highlighted the centrality of songs as a form of creative counter-power that articulates critiques of the city, institutional politics and everyday life, while negotiating the limits of what can be said within commercialised and mediated environments (Sacaluga-Rodríguez and Pérez-García, 2017; Merino-Rivera, 2024; Valdivia Alonso, 2026). This literature is complemented by work that conceptualises the copla as a multimodal artistic form in which verbal text, music, performance and staging are inseparable. Páramo's work on the carnival of coplas understands the genre as a popular literary, musical and theatrical form with its own conventions and cultural authority (Páramo, 2017). Fernández Jiménez's research on the creative process of carnival groups and the audiovisual mediation of the COAC helps situate professionalisation, media visibility and legitimacy within the production of carnival repertoires (Fernández Jiménez, 2020). More recent work by Garrido Castellano (2026) places Cádiz within a broader sonic politics of the carnivalesque, connecting chorus, collective voice and political economy. Finally, González Dávila and Pérez Garrido's (2025) study of the linguistic landscape of touristification in Cádiz provides a parallel corpus-based account of how housing loss, neighbourhood transformation and the commodification of the historic centre are inscribed and contested in urban space.

Considered as a whole, this literature supports the article's analytical move: to read carnival not only as heritage or entertainment, but as a mediated arena in which claims about belonging, legitimacy and the distribution of participation are publicly made and challenged. It also supports the treatment of carnival lyrics not as isolated cultural ornaments, but as publicly circulated texts through which local actors encode, perform and contest changing relations between heritage, tourism and urban life – particularly in tourist cities where visibility and economic value intensify struggles over who the carnival is for, and under what urban conditions it can be sustained.

Despite extensive work on authenticity, commodification and identity in festival and heritage tourism, two gaps remain particularly relevant for mature urban destinations. First, tourism and ICH scholarship often treat festivals mainly as products, experiences or symbolic heritage resources, while the urban inequalities that shape participation – housing pressure, crowding, public-space regulation and the capacity to remain in central neighbourhoods – are frequently addressed in parallel urban tourism literature rather than analysed as part of heritage governance itself. Second, studies of carnivals have foregrounded symbolism, satire and political critique, but have paid less attention to how tourism-led urban change is narrated and contested through carnival lyrics as a recurrent form of vernacular public commentary.

This article addresses these gaps by bringing together living heritage governance, touristification and spatial justice in the case of Cádiz Carnival. Its theoretical contribution is to argue that safeguarding living heritage in tourist cities cannot be reduced to protecting cultural expressions or managing visitor experience. It also requires attention to the social and spatial conditions that allow residents and practitioners to remain, participate and reproduce cultural practices in place. In this sense, the right to remain is not treated as an external urban issue, but as a constitutive condition of social sustainability in living heritage.

The methodological contribution lies in treating carnival lyrics as a situated vernacular corpus rather than as illustrative examples. Coplas are analysed as publicly circulated cultural texts through which local actors narrate urban change, assign responsibility, draw symbolic boundaries and evaluate the moral economy of touristification. When read alongside interviews and participant observation, they provide access not only to individual perceptions or observed practices but also to a collective and recurring form of public commentary embedded in the festival itself. This triangulated approach makes it possible to trace how touristification is experienced, spatially negotiated and culturally elaborated within the same living heritage field.

Empirically, the article provides a contemporary analysis of the Cádiz Carnival during the 2025 festival cycle and situates selected lyrics within a longer trajectory of carnival representations of tourism. The analysis shows how tourism has moved from being imagined as recognition and visibility to being increasingly framed as a source of displacement, commodification and loss of local control. In doing so, the article offers a framework for analysing how living traditions are transformed into destination showcases in tourist cities and for understanding carnival lyrics as a potential diagnostic resource for heritage and destination governance.

The study takes a qualitative, ethnographically inspired approach, suitable for analysing festive practices, meanings and power relations from the perspective of those involved (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007; Flick, 2014). It adopts a single-case study design centred on the 2025 Cádiz Carnival. Following Stake's (1995) logic, the case is treated as instrumental: it is used to illuminate broader questions about how living heritage is governed as a public practice under the pressures of touristification in mature urban destinations. In Yin's (2014) terms, the design is a single-case, embedded study. The unit of analysis is the Carnival as an urban festival field. In contrast, embedded units include official competition venues, street circuits, clubs/peñas and mediated song texts, examined in relation to one another.

The design and analysis strategy are aligned with the theoretical lens set out in Section 2. Rather than imposing a closed deductive model, the study combines sensitising concepts (safeguarding, commodification, spatial justice) with inductive thematic development from empirical material. Themes emerged through iterative coding and comparison across datasets and are reported in a way that keeps their connection to the analytical lens explicit (Sections 4 and 5).

The fieldwork was carried out during the 2025 Cádiz Carnival festival cycle, covering both the Official Carnival Group Competition (COAC) and main street activities, including group performances, choir parades and events in squares and neighbourhoods. Participant observation took place across different spaces and times during the Carnival, combining attendance at COAC performances, performances in tablaos and peñas and repeated walks through key points of the festival in the historic centre and other urban areas. Observation focused on how participation was organised and experienced by residents and visitors; interactions among groups, audiences and institutions; the presence of tourism-related infrastructure and branding; and how urban space was materially and symbolically reconfigured during the festival.

Observations were recorded in a field diary, which contained detailed descriptions of scenes, significant dialogues and preliminary analytical reflections (Emerson et al., 2011; Sergidou, 2022). This material was used to contextualise interview accounts and lyric analysis within situated festive practice and its spatial dimension. The observation protocol prioritised: (1) points where resident and visitor itineraries intersected (e.g. entrances/exits, crowded squares, “must-see” routes); (2) moments of formal regulation (policing, barriers, stage programming) and informal negotiation (improvised performances, neighbourhood gatherings); and (3) material signs of tourism infrastructure and destination branding (signage, temporary services, promotional campaigns). Field notes distinguished between descriptive records and analytic memos (Emerson et al., 2011).

Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with key actors in the carnival field. Purposive sampling sought variation in role and participation modality (e.g. authors, performers, peña members, organisers, cultural managers and specialist commentators), trajectory (established and newer participants) and positions towards institutionalisation and professionalisation (Patton, 2002). Ten interviews were conducted (approximately 60–90 min), audio-recorded with informed consent and transcribed verbatim. Interviews took place in settings close to carnival practice (rehearsal venues, clubs and regular meeting places), which supported rapport and situated accounts.

Inclusion criteria were (1) holding a recognised role within the carnival field; (2) direct experience of at least one arena where current tensions are negotiated (COAC, street performances, rehearsal spaces, local associations or policy/management discussions); and (3) willingness to reflect on heritage recognition, commodification, tourism and participation. Recruitment proceeded through initial contacts in the carnival milieu and snowball referrals, while actively seeking variation in role, modality, gender and career stage.

The semi-structured guide covered: (1) biographies and attachments to Carnival and the city; (2) perceived changes in participation, professionalisation and media visibility; (3) experiences and evaluations of tourism and visitor presence; (4) perceptions of heritage recognition and safeguarding; and (5) conflicts around public space, housing and the everyday conditions of sustaining the festival. To enhance transparency, Table 1 summarises interview participants using pseudonyms, modality and contextual information, potentially identifying demographic details are omitted.

In Table 1, “modality” refers to the main form of carnival participation associated with each interviewee. In the Cádiz Carnival, the principal official modalities include comparsa, a musically and poetically elaborate ensemble often associated with lyrical critique and social commentary; chirigota, a comic and satirical ensemble built around humour, parody and topical criticism; coro, a larger choral ensemble traditionally linked to Cádiz streets and tango-based repertoires; and cuarteto, a small-format comic modality based primarily on spoken performance and humorous interaction. The term street chirigota refers to non-official or “callejera” groups performing outside the formal competition, usually in public spaces and with a more informal and direct relationship to audiences.

Cádiz Carnival is a major urban festival structured around both formal and informal arenas, most visibly the Official Carnival Group Competition (COAC) and a dense ecology of street performances, neighbourhood gatherings and peña/tablao settings. Heritage management instruments in Spain and Andalusia describe the Carnival as a key expression of local identity, strongly anchored in the city's public spaces and in distinctive forms of speech, recitation and song (Quintero-Morón, 2022).

Academic research has documented the festival's transformation into a cultural industry, shaped by the expansion of COAC, media coverage and digital platforms, as well as the growing visibility of Carnival as an urban brand (Sacaluga-Rodríguez and Pérez-García, 2017). At the same time, work on carnival songs highlights their continuing role as vernacular commentary on everyday life and as a medium through which the city narrates itself, its conflicts and its collective memories (Alcina-Segura, 2022).

These characteristics make Cádiz Carnival an analytically revealing case for examining how a living heritage practice is governed as a contested public good in a tourist city, and how participation, visibility and access are negotiated across institutional venues, street circuits and mediated cultural production.

The focal lyrics corpus was composed of eight complete carnival groups rather than isolated excerpts (Table 2). Groups were selected through purposive criteria because tourism, touristification, housing pressure, commodification, residential displacement, visitor–resident relations or the transformation of public space appeared as explicit or analytically significant themes in their repertoire. The corpus was not designed as a representative sample of Cádiz Carnival lyrics as a whole, but as a focused analytical corpus aimed at tracing how tourism-related urban change is publicly narrated, evaluated and contested through carnival song.

The unit of analysis was the complete group repertoire, with closer attention to specific pieces – pasodobles, cuplés, presentations, refrains or relevant fragments – where tourism-related urban change, visitor–resident relations, hospitality, residential displacement or the transformation of public space were explicitly or intertextually articulated. Selected excerpts from these groups are discussed in the findings where they illuminate specific analytical categories. The remaining groups informed the thematic coding and helped situate the 2025 repertoire within a longer trajectory of carnival representations of tourism, from tourism as recognition and openness to touristification as displacement, commodification and loss of local control.

The empirical material – field notes, interview transcripts and carnival lyrics – was analysed using a critical discourse analysis (CDA) orientation, treating discourse as a social practice that both reflects and shapes power relations, subject positions and moral orders (Van Dijk, 1999, 2008; Wodak and Meyer, 2016). This orientation was appropriate for examining how touristification, heritage recognition, public-space regulation and residentiality were narrated, evaluated and contested across different arenas of the Carnival.

The analysis proceeded in four stages. First, open coding identified recurring issues and evaluative positions across interviews, field notes and lyrics, including heritage recognition, tourism visibility, professionalisation, authenticity claims, public-space conflicts, housing pressure and participation. Second, codes were grouped into higher-level themes through iterative comparison across datasets. Third, CDA-informed close reading examined how lyrics and interview narratives constructed subject positions (“we”, “outsiders”, “institutions”), metaphors of invasion or sale, irony, blame attribution and moral boundaries. Fourth, triangulation assessed whether themes appeared across sources and arenas, and where divergences revealed competing positions within the carnival field.

The three sources played distinct analytical roles. Interviews captured how carnival actors narrated the city, evaluated institutional decisions and described changes in participation. Observation recorded how space was practised and contested during the festival, including crowding, routes, informal ordering and the material presence of tourism infrastructure. Carnival lyrics showed how these tensions were culturally elaborated, collectivised and publicly returned through a vernacular form of social commentary. Triangulation was therefore not used simply to confirm the same finding across sources, but to connect perceptions, spatial practices and symbolic elaborations within the same living heritage field.

This strategy also informed the organisation of the findings. Themes were retained when they were analytically relevant to the research questions and could be traced across at least two sources, or when a divergence between sources revealed a significant tension in the governance of Carnival. For example, tourism could appear in interviews as an ambivalent source of recognition and income, in observation as crowding and spatial reordering and in lyrics as a metaphor of sale, invasion or loss of local control. Reading these materials together made it possible to distinguish between tourism as visibility, touristification as spatial pressure and commodification as a transformation in the terms under which Carnival is valued and governed.

Ethnographically inspired research requires explicit reflection on how the research team's position shapes access, rapport and interpretation. The study maintained a reflexive audit trail alongside the field diary, recording decisions about sampling, emergent assumptions and moments of discomfort or contestation in the field (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007). Reflexive notes were used to interrogate how familiarity with the setting, language, access routes and the public nature of carnival performances shaped what could be observed and voiced and to guide decisions about what identifying details could be reported.

The researcher's relationship to Cádiz and to carnival practice was outsider and access to participants was facilitated through networks. To mitigate bias, recruitment actively sought variation in role and stance towards institutionalisation and tourism, and analytic memos were used to consider alternative interpretations during theme development.

The study was conducted in accordance with the ethical principles of social research and the recommendations of university ethics committees. All interviewees were informed of the purpose of the study, the academic use of the information and their right to withdraw consent at any time. Anonymity was protected through pseudonyms and by omitting details that could enable identification in a bounded cultural field. Field notes are reported at an aggregate level and do not include identifying information about private individuals encountered in public settings.

In the case of song lyrics, which are publicly disseminated artistic creations, groups and authors are cited when relevant to the analysis. Where lyrics are quoted, excerpts are intentionally short and used for analytic purposes; longer passages are paraphrased to respect copyright and to minimise reproduction of protected material.

All interview excerpts and lyric quotations originally in Spanish were translated into English by the authors. Where necessary, translations prioritise analytical meaning over literal equivalence, particularly in excerpts involving humour, wordplay or local idioms.

Across sources, five themes emerged from the iterative coding and CDA procedure. They are reported below to show (1) how heritage recognition and transmission are experienced; (2) how tourism and commodified participation are negotiated; (3) how touristification produces spatial conflicts that reshape access; and (4) how carnival actors articulate boundaries and claims for participatory governance.

Participant observation of the 2025 Cádiz Carnival confirms its status as living heritage closely linked to the city, reproduced through embodied routines and intergenerational sociability. Field notes captured intergenerational transmission in mundane, embodied ways. During one street performance, the researchers encountered a family group wearing the same outfit as the chirigota in which the father performed. The child's matching costume was presented and explained as part of “being with” the group, turning participation into a visible family practice rather than a spectator experience. This scene illustrates how Carnival identity is reproduced through imitation, affiliation and shared presence in public space, linking safeguarding to everyday family attachments and neighbourhood sociability.

More broadly, repeated use of public space, recurring routes and neighbourhood-based sociability point to a practice recognised as “ours” and sustained through everyday attachments. This status is also reinforced through heritage recognition in Andalusian cultural policy instruments (Quintero-Morón, 2022; Sacaluga-Rodríguez and Pérez-García, 2017). Interviewees described Carnival recognition in affective and mnemonic terms, emphasising how it condenses memory, belonging and attachment even as formats change (Chen et al., 2020; Quintero-Morón, 2022; Sevilla-Herrera, 2024). As one interviewee put it, “Carnival is a reflection of who we are …“, framing perceived changes in the festival as linked to a wider sense of identity loss (E2).

Within this frame, songs operate as a public mnemonic infrastructure. Lyrics map neighbourhoods, lost trades and local history, producing what previous work has described as a sung urban landscape (Alcina-Segura, 2023). For safeguarding, this matters because what is “kept alive” is not only a performance technique but also a shared way of narrating the city and asserting who belongs in it.

Triangulation across observations, interviews and songs suggests that this living heritage is being reconfigured under growing pressures of touristification. One interviewee summarised the shift through a demographic metaphor: “now you have more hotels than residents, and you can see that in the rehearsals, in who stays here in winter” (E5). During the festive cycle, visitor influx concentrates dense flows in specific streets and time slots. It encourages relatively standardised itineraries for festive consumption, including attendance at the Gran Teatro Falla, movement between “essential” central points and mass concerts programmed by the City Council. In field notes, this standardisation was visible in repeated crowd movements along the same routes and bottlenecks around flagship spaces, with informal performances often pushed to the edges of the busiest circuits. This pattern aligns with research showing how tourism supply and mobility concentrate pressure in the historic centres of consolidated destinations (Sarrión-Gavilán et al., 2015; Espeso-Molinero, 2019).

At the same time, interviewees' assessments were ambivalent. Tourism and media coverage were framed as potential sources of legitimacy and income, enabling professionalisation, sustaining artistic labour and widening audiences (Sacaluga-Rodríguez and Pérez-García, 2017). However, professionalisation was also described as introducing administrative and financial thresholds that reshape who can participate and on what terms. As one participant put it, “The competition brings many difficulties in terms of bureaucracy and money – you have to register with the tax authorities” (E5). This ambivalence is summarised in Figure 1, which maps the tensions through which participants evaluate visibility, commodification and participation.

Figure 1 should be read as a relational map rather than as a set of separate impacts. Heritage recognition increases the legitimacy and visibility of Carnival, but it can also intensify its circulation as a destination asset. Economic opportunities may support artistic labour and professionalisation, yet they also introduce financial, bureaucratic and media thresholds that reshape who can participate. Touristification expands audiences and visitor presence, but it concentrates pressure on housing, mobility and public space. Finally, the perceived loss of identity and public space condenses the distributive dimension of these tensions: the question is not only how Carnival is represented, but who can remain close to the spaces, associations and neighbourhood routines that sustain it. This distributive dimension is developed in the following section through the analysis of public space, residentiality and the everyday conditions of participation.

Alongside opportunities, interviewees expressed clear concerns about how touristification reshapes everyday life and the conditions of participation in Carnival. They reported increased costs during the festive cycle, saturation of spaces associated with neighbourhood participation and a sense that some planning and programming decisions respond more to destination-image priorities than to residents' needs. Several distinguished between a Carnival “for the photo” and an “inside” Carnival centred on the copla, the rehearsal, the peña and the street. One interviewee posed this as a question of residentiality and audience: “Carnival brings life to the neighbourhood, but if in the end the neighbourhood is for tourists, who are we singing for?” (E3).

This framing shifts the analytical focus from debates over authenticity alone to the material and regulatory conditions that make participation possible: housing, crowding and access to central streets. Observationally, street participation appeared to be ordered through coexisting governance logics. On the one hand, official circuits channelled performances by COAC groups onto programmed stages (tablados). On the other hand, non-official and street-based chirigotas distributed themselves across streets and squares through an informal ordering that relied on local knowledge, tacit rules and situational negotiation. These parallel arrangements shape where and when different forms of participation can occur, and how easily residents and visitors can access them.

The loss of local control described by participants operated through several mechanisms rather than through a single process. Housing pressure affected who could remain in neighbourhoods historically associated with carnival practice; visitor concentration altered everyday mobility and access to key streets; programmed stages and flagship routes redistributed visibility towards more governable spaces; and tourism branding reframed Carnival as an experience to be consumed as much as a practice to be sustained. These mechanisms show why touristification was experienced not merely as an increase in visitors, but as a reallocation of authority over the city's festive spaces.

In this sense, the question raised by participants is not only cultural but distributive: who can remain close to the festival's core spaces, who can access them during peak periods and whose needs are prioritised in urban festival governance. This distributive concern was expressed directly through the link between residentiality and cultural reproduction: [“if no local people are living in the city, it becomes impossible; and if those who make Carnival no longer live in La Viña or Santa María, outside the city it will be different”] (E8). These concerns resonate with critical accounts of heritage branding and the inequalities that accompany tourism-led place reconfiguration (Bianchi, 2003; Chang-Vargas, 2019; Parralejo and Díaz-Parra, 2021).

Carnival lyrics provide the most condensed public articulation of the tensions identified in interviews and observation. In the focal corpus, tourism is not represented through a single moral position. Earlier repertoires frame tourism as recognition, hospitality and desired visibility, whereas recent lyrics increasingly associate touristification with housing loss, commodification, public-space saturation and the erosion of resident control. This shift is analytically important because it shows how Carnival itself registers changes in the moral economy of tourism: from tourism as a source of external recognition to touristification as a perceived reallocation of the city away from its residents.

A first recurring discursive strategy is the transformation of the city into an object of exchange. In La ciudad invisible, the phrase “neighbourhoods are being sold off” condenses the idea that the urban fabric itself has become available for sale. Y seguimos cantando develops a related critique through the image of Cádiz as a theme park, where local culture, tourist apartments and staged performance are brought together as signs of a city converted into a consumable attraction. Las Ratas intensifies this commodification frame through the image of a Cádiz that can be bought and sold. These lyrics do not simply denounce “inauthenticity”; they link heritage visibility to distributive conflict by asking who profits from the circulation of Cádiz as a destination image and who bears the social costs of that visibility.

A second strategy is boundary work between lived attachment and temporary consumption. In recent repertoires, the distinction between residents and visitors is not always articulated as hostility to outsiders, but as a contrast between different relations to place: the neighbourhood as home, memory and everyday infrastructure versus the city as a weekend asset, image or experience. This contrast is especially clear in lyrics that oppose the tourist apartment, the staged tablao or the “theme park” city to the lived neighbourhood and the street-based ecology of Carnival. Apartamentos turísticos Juani Wainjaus turns the tourist accommodation itself into the comic setting of the chirigota, making short-term rental culture visible through the line “we're losing our identity, and tourist rentals are running at full capacity, locals are being pushed out”. The humour of the piece lies in exaggeration, but analytically it points to a serious transformation: housing and neighbourhood life are being reframed as tourist products.

A third strategy is the dramatization of urban emptying and loss of control. Las ratas is not only a metaphor of invasion; it inverts the figure of the rat to point to those who remain in a city increasingly reorganised for others. In this sense, the lyric gives cultural form to the same concern expressed in interviews: if the people who make Carnival can no longer live in or access its core neighbourhoods, the practice may survive as an event while losing part of the social ecology that sustains it. El Cementerio develops this concern through the image of a city without its people. The phrase “Cádiz without its people” condenses this fear of an emptied city, where the loss of residents becomes the loss of the everyday social life that sustains neighbourhood culture.

The corpus also shows that this critique is historically and intertextually organised. Earlier repertoires such as Los corrusquillos gaditanos and Las Momias de güete pa guá los niños offered imaginaries of tourism, openness and hospitality linked to recognition, urban pride and the image of Cádiz as an open city. In the contemporary corpus, however, that openness is increasingly recoded as vulnerability to dispossession. The contrast matters analytically because it shows that Carnival does not simply oppose visitors; rather, it distinguishes between hospitality as a local civic value and touristification as a process through which residents lose control over the conditions of shared urban life.

The analytical value of the corpus therefore lies in how lyrics translate dispersed urban pressures into shared cultural forms. They condense grievances, assign responsibility, mobilise humour and irony and make everyday inequalities audible in public. Read alongside interviews and observation, they function as vernacular public commentary and as a situated feedback infrastructure for heritage and destination governance.

Across arenas, Cádiz Carnival appears as a field of forces in which community-oriented logics and tourism-oriented logics coexist and sometimes clash. In settings where neighbourhood sociability predominates (clubs/peñas, unofficial circuits and less crowded performances), participation is organised through proximity, tacit norms and local attachments. In other settings – especially in flagship venues and highly mediated spaces – participation is shaped by spectacle, programming and consumption, including sponsorship, audiovisual infrastructures and events designed to maximise attendance. The result is not a simple displacement of one “authentic” Carnival by another, but an uneven reordering of visibility, access and control across the festival's spatial ecology.

These coexisting logics feed into contested imaginaries of the festival's future. In interviews, the issue was often framed less as the presence of outsiders per se and more as who sets the terms under which Carnival is sustained and for whom it is governed. As one interviewee put it, “the problem is not that people come from outside; the problem is when the festival ceases to be ours” (E4). In songs, similar concerns appear through contrasting valuations of openness and loss, articulated through intertextual references that remain active in contemporary practice. During participant observation, the traditional verse “the key to Cádiz was for anyone who wanted to enter without knocking” was heard in peñas and on the street, circulating as a shared reference point for how openness and hospitality are imagined. A similar historical reference appeared through Paco Alba' repertoire, which evoked Cádiz as an ancient city whose value deserved external recognition. Contemporary responses, however, recode that openness as dispossession – for instance, by denouncing “the treacherous hand that gave the third away to outsiders” (Pérez Fuentes y Guillén Bancalero, 2025). In this way, past and present repertoires are used to argue over whether the city is being shared, sold or taken.

The intertextual dialogue between older and recent repertoires is central to these contested futures. The 1963 and 1986 references evoke moments in which tourism and openness could be imagined as recognition, hospitality or urban pride. Recent repertoires, however, recode that openness through the language of dispossession: the problem is no longer that outsiders enter the city, but that the terms of entry, consumption and investment appear to be set against residents' capacity to remain. This intertextual contrast helps explain why the same cultural value – Cádiz as an open city–can be mobilised both as a hospitable imaginary and as a critique of touristification.

At the same time, the data show disagreement over what safeguarding should entail. Boundary language (“essence”, “spirit”, “ours”) operates as a defence against perceived excess commodification, while other voices caution against freezing tradition and stress negotiated change with meaningful community participation (Quintero-Morón, 2022; Sevilla-Herrera, 2024). Taken together, these findings set the stage for discussing how safeguarding, commodification and spatial justice intersect in urban festival governance and what this implies for participation and residentiality in tourist cities.

Overall, the findings show that Cádiz Carnival is best understood as a contested public practice whose conditions of participation are shaped by the intersection of heritage governance, commodification and urban inequality. Safeguarding is reproduced through embodied routines and intergenerational attachments, but recognition also intensifies struggles over legitimacy and control. Touristification does not simply add external audiences; it reorganises the festival's spatial ecology through concentrated flows, programmed circuits and mediated visibility, while professionalisation introduces administrative and financial thresholds that can act as barriers to participation. At street level, coexisting formal and informal orders structure access in uneven ways, and lyrics operate as a vernacular public critique that frames these dynamics as issues of belonging, residentiality and the right to remain. The discussion develops these implications by linking the results to debates on cultural citizenship and spatial justice in tourist cities, and by specifying what participatory safeguarding might require when festivals are central to destination branding and when residentiality is at stake.

The first theme shows that heritage recognition operates as more than a label: it legitimises the festival, supports intergenerational transmission and frames Carnival as a public good. At the same time, listing and nomination processes can shift authority towards institutions and managerial logics, raising questions about who defines what is safeguarded and for what purposes (UNESCO, 2003; González Cambeiro, 2015; Quintero-Morón, 2022). In Cádiz, the co-presence of safeguarding language and tourism branding suggests that recognition can simultaneously protect and market the festival, intensifying the need for participatory governance rather than symbolic endorsement alone. Sociologically, this points to recognition as a redistribution of authority: it changes who can legitimately speak for the festival and on what grounds.

The second and fourth themes complicate a simple narrative of commodification versus resistance. The evidence points to an intermediate configuration in which visibility and professionalisation are valued, yet boundaries are actively drawn against a “theme park” Carnival. Rather than treating “authenticity” as the main problem, the findings highlight the conditions of participation: who can access key arenas, whose practices are made visible and how administrative and financial requirements shape entry into formal circuits. In this sense, commodification appears less as cultural “death” than as a reordering of legitimacy and gatekeeping, even as participants continue to negotiate meaning and value (Wang, 1999; Shepherd, 2002). Crucially, songs do not merely reflect pressures; they publicly name them, ridicule them and sometimes propose norms for respectful participation, illustrating how community agency can operate through vernacular media as well as through formal organisations.

The third theme suggests that the most consequential conflicts around living heritage in tourist cities may be spatial. When housing pressures, crowding and public-space regulation change who can remain in central neighbourhoods and who can access the streets during Carnival, participation becomes uneven, and heritage risks being preserved as performance without the social ecology that sustains it. The Cádiz case illustrates this through the coexistence of formal circuits (programmed stages for COAC groups) and informal street ordering (callejeras), which allocate visibility and access differently and are experienced as increasingly constrained under touristified peak conditions. This connects safeguarding debates to critical tourism work on inequalities and “right to the city” struggles in historic centres (Bianchi, 2003; Mínguez et al., 2019; Parralejo and Díaz-Parra, 2021; Milano et al., 2024a). The implication is that debates about commodification should be paired with questions of residentiality and access: safeguarding in tourist cities requires attention to the material conditions of making culture.

In aggregate, the findings underline that the key issue is not whether tourism is present, but under what conditions tourist uses of Carnival are articulated and who participates in decision-making. Policies that treat Carnival primarily as an event product risk reinforce a “showcase” logic that extracts value while externalising costs onto residents. By contrast, participatory safeguarding would require mechanisms through which carnival associations, groups and residents can shape programming priorities, crowd management and the relationship between festival promotion and housing/public-space governance. In Cádiz, the tension between formal circuits and informal street ordering suggests that governance cannot focus solely on flagship venues; it must also recognise the infrastructures that sustain neighbourhood participation. If residents are displaced from the social spaces that sustain carnival practice, safeguarding may preserve the event's image while undermining its long-term sustainability. The case, therefore, supports calls to analyse tourism development as part of broader place-making politics and to evaluate heritage strategies against criteria of equity and community benefit (Bianchi, 2003; Chang-Vargas, 2019; González-Reverté, 2023).

Carnival lyrics should therefore be understood not only as expressive artefacts but also as a vernacular feedback infrastructure. Because they are produced annually, publicly circulated and embedded in recognised repertoires of humour, critique and belonging, coplas provide situated indicators of emerging social tensions. They do not replace policy data on housing, visitor flows or economic impacts, but they help identify how such pressures are interpreted, morally evaluated and translated into claims about belonging and legitimacy. For cultural managers and destination-governance actors, this suggests that listening to carnival repertoires can become part of participatory safeguarding: not as a folkloric consultation exercise, but as a way of tracking how the community publicly narrates the changing conditions of cultural reproduction.

This article contributes to sustainable tourism research by showing that the sustainability of heritage festivals in mature destinations depends on more than visitor management or symbolic safeguarding; it also depends on resident liveability, equitable access and the local social infrastructures that make participation possible. By conceptualising Cádiz Carnival as a field of tensions structured by heritage recognition, commodification and spatial justice, the paper offers an integrated lens for understanding how cultural citizenship claims, boundary work and governance disputes are co-produced under touristification. In doing so, it shifts attention from authenticity as a self-contained debate towards the distribution of participation and the right to remain as core mechanisms shaping living heritage futures.

For policy and management, the findings point to three levels of action. At the municipal level, safeguarding Carnival requires coordination between cultural programming, public-space management, mobility, crowding and housing pressures. This includes protecting neighbourhood-based infrastructures such as peñas, rehearsal spaces, informal circuits and accessible street settings, rather than concentrating governance only on flagship venues or visitor-oriented programming.

At the regional level, heritage governance should connect the recognition of intangible cultural heritage with the material conditions that make participation possible. This means aligning cultural safeguarding with tourism, housing and urban-planning policies and ensuring that carnival associations, groups and residents are included in decisions about promotion, regulation and the use of public space.

At the multilevel or national level, the case suggests that living heritage in tourist cities should be assessed not only through indicators of attendance, media visibility or economic impact, but also through residents' capacity to remain, rehearse, meet, sing and participate in the places where the practice is reproduced. Carnival lyrics can contribute to this governance agenda as a diagnostic and monitoring tool: an annual, situated and publicly shared form of commentary that makes emerging concerns about housing, commodification, inequality and loss of control culturally legible.

Considered together, these priorities suggest that participatory safeguarding in tourist cities must address both cultural representation and the distributive conditions of participation. The question is not only how to preserve Carnival as an event, but how to sustain the urban and residential ecology that allows it to remain a living heritage practice.

The study has limitations that define the scope of its claims. It is based on an intensive qualitative case study and does not seek statistical representativeness. Its contribution lies in analytical transferability: by triangulating interviews, participant observation and a focal corpus of lyrics, it identifies mechanisms through which touristification affects participation, residentiality and public-space governance in a living heritage field. These mechanisms should not be mechanically generalised to all festivals or tourist cities, but they offer categories for comparison in other contexts where heritage practices are shaped by visitor economies and urban inequality.

The focus on a single festival cycle provides a detailed snapshot but limits claims about longer-term change. Future research could develop a diachronic analysis of lyrics alongside policy shifts, housing data and transformations in tourist infrastructure. The analysis centres mainly on residents, practitioners and carnival actors; systematic inclusion of visitors' perspectives would help map how tourist itineraries and understandings interact with local norms and street-level ordering. Comparative work across tourist cities and across different forms of living heritage would also help identify which mechanisms travel beyond Cádiz and which remain context specific.

Finally, the article has treated lyrics as a focal vernacular corpus rather than as a statistically representative textual archive. Although the corpus includes historically significant repertoires and recent COAC groups, it does not systematically examine the wider universe of street carnival or callejera repertoires. This is relevant because non-official groups often articulate more immediate, improvised and locally situated critiques of tourism, public space and everyday urban life. Future work could therefore expand the corpus longitudinally, compare COAC and street repertoire and examine audience reception to better understand how carnival commentary circulates and influences public debate.