ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the story of how knowledge is constructed, shared and embedded in tourism planning and development processes and branding strategies that promote tourism in the Province of Huelva, Spain. The story told in this chapter provides an alternative path to understanding processes of branding and place identity development. The chapter transcends these ontological frames and the operational worlds of branding and marketing, to explore how Huelva, the Light' came to be as a social, political and economic idea via a process of knowledge building, information dissemination and policy leadership. The approach adopted is sympathetic to assertions by post-structural and postmodern scholars who argue that knowledge is a social product and it cannot be understood outside the context in which it is generated. In summarising the results of the survey to Mr. Blanco, Vargas Snchez explained the value of the light: In an increasingly competitive global tourism environment, the challenges for the emerging tourist destination of Huelva were considerable.
