Dark tourism
Dark tourism is travel to places associated with death, tragedy, or human suffering, including sites of atrocity, disaster, and memorialization.
Thanatourism: Travel motivated by encounters with death, mortality, or places associated with death. This overlapping term emphasizes mortality as a motive within dark tourism.
Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum: A memorial and museum at the former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp in occupied Poland. It is a defining site for confronting the Holocaust through preserved place and evidence.
Dark tourism spectrum: A model ranking dark tourism sites by factors such as purpose, authenticity, and educational emphasis. It explains why a solemn memorial and an entertainment attraction can both draw on tragedy.
Disaster tourism: Travel to areas affected by disasters, often while recovery or response is still underway. It is narrower in timing and setting than dark tourism's broad range of sites.
Collective memory: Shared representations of the past through which groups shape identity and historical understanding. Dark tourism sites can make public memory tangible through visits and commemoration.
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park: A memorial park in Hiroshima commemorating victims of the 1945 atomic bombing and promoting peace. Its visitor experience connects mass death with a public appeal against nuclear war.
Heritage tourism: Travel motivated by interest in places, objects, and practices associated with the past. Dark tourism overlaps with heritage travel when sites interpret historical events.
Slum tourism: Organized visits to economically marginalized urban neighborhoods, often marketed as cultural experience. It raises related ethical questions but is not necessarily centered on death or tragedy.
Difficult heritage: Past events and places that communities find painful, shameful, or contested to inherit. Many dark tourism sites preserve histories that remain politically or morally difficult.
Ground Zero: The site of the World Trade Center destroyed in the September 11 attacks in New York City. Its transformation from attack site to memorial and museum illustrates changing visitor purposes.