Exile tours from the Exile Memorial Museum-MUME: a decade connecting sites of memory at the Catalan cross-border region

The sites of memory of the Catalan cross-border region are spread from north to south of the Pyrenees and bonded with the history and memory of the republican exile, as well as with other historical episodes such as the fugitives of the Second World War, military fortifications or the Spanish Civil War itself in relationship with the territory. From its public inauguration back in February 2008, the Exile Memorial Museum– MUME from La Jonquera has become the cultural facility in charge of organizing almost all the initiatives that account for the recovery of the republican exile memory. The implementation of a rigorous permanent exhibition, a dynamic programming of temporary exhibitions, the active participation on different research activities, besides a well consolidated educational department, collaborated altogether on strongly embedding the MUME into the social and cultural spectrum of the country itself. From all the activities organized on a regular basis, the exile tours, the core of the whole museum offer through the educational department, are the very communicative channel that connects the MUME with the territory. This paper will synthetically summarize the analysis of the different existing guided tours on the Catalan cross-border region around the subject of the republican exile. From its origins as a pedagogical proposal at a university level to the current consolidated offer from MUME educational department, sites acting as nodes and the different narratives emerging from touring practice will be shown. The particular case here
presented confirms the capacity that guided tours have in order to initiate different processes of heritagisation.