Nostalgic airmindedness: tourism, postcolonial anesthesia, and national heritage at Lisbon airport

Capital city airports are more than logistical infrastructures: they are tourism destination-makers where national identity, heritage, and cultural governance converge for diverse audiences. As the first and last impression of a nation for international visitors, airports occupy a uniquely high-stakes position in the production of tourism imaginaries (Salazar, Citation2012). Lisbon’s Humberto Delgado Airport – which received 36 million passengers in 2025 (ANA Aeroportos de Portugal, Citation2026) and serves as the hub of TAP Air Portugal – illustrates how a formerly colonial European state deploys aeromobility infrastructure to stage national identity while simultaneously managing an uncomfortable postcolonial past. Drawing on sixteen years of ethnographic fieldwork (2009–2025), this article argues that Lisbon Airport functions as a tourism destination-maker through four interconnected mechanisms: strategic cultural programming (orchestras, fado, gastronomy); infrastructure commodification (azulejos, trams, cork as purchasable nationalism); the performance of what I call ‘flying colonial history’ (aviation mythology, TAP branding, commemorative naming); and the systematic racialized exclusion of African lusophone cultural production despite the city’s self-styling as ‘the most African city in Europe.’ The analysis is anchored in three conceptual frameworks: tourism imaginaries, racialized lusophony, and ‘postcolonial anesthesia.’ Together they illuminate how Portuguese tourism destination-making depends structurally on colonial amnesia – a troubling dependency with direct implications for how tourism scholarship theorises nationalism, heritage, and aeromobility.