Unveiling Madeira’s destination image and representations through Virtual Museum of Tourism (MUVITUR)®

Abstract This article intends to demonstrate the importance of the existence of an aggregating platform for digital content, as is the case of MUVITUR – Virtual Museum of Tourism, for the research in tourism and also to assess its potential. Aiming to track the history of Madeira’s destination image, this paper also searches to contribute to the study of the ‘Atlantic Pearl’ distinctive features for promotional purposes throughout seventy years. For this purpose, the authors did an integrated search aiming to find and study the retrieved results of promotional visual materials edited during the twentieth century, focusing on Madeira Island, as an example of the potentialities of the Muvitur database. With this research, we can conclude that tourism marketing strategies seem to have succeeded to consolidate Madeira’s destination image focused on its distinctiveness. Digital objects gathered in such searchable thematic databases, with a diversity of content providers, can play a crucial role in the history of tourism and leisure, allowing us, at the same time, to know how Madeira represented the destination for promotional aims.