New rurality, traditional music and tourist experience

Fernando Lopes-Graça, a prolific Portuguese composer, joined the French musicologist Michel Giacometti (1929-1990) in the effort of collecting and cataloguing popular songs, culminating in a collection of recordings, unique in Europe, which covered all Portugal. In the context of this paper we intend to show how the work of Lopes-Graça, challenging the traditional music, can allow a touring through traditions, while allowing design a cultural environment for the most demanding tourists. The purpose of this research is to develop a tourism product in the near future based on Lopes-Graça and Giacometti’s (musical and spatial) journey through Portuguese traditional music, which portray a rural Portugal in all its dimensions including beliefs, uses and activities.