The Gastronomy of the Department of Bolivar as Intangible Cultural Heritage: Ancestry, Preservation, and Tradition Bearers in Cartagena

Abstract

This article examines how the academic literature has conceptualized the gastronomy of the Department of Bolivar in Cartagena as a form of intangible cultural heritage, with particular attention to ancestry, cultural preservation, and the role of tradition bearers in the transmission of culinary knowledge. The study was developed as an integrative literature review with a critical analytical orientation, bringing together conceptual, empirical, institutional, and comparative scholarship on food heritage, safeguarding, memory, territorial identity, and patrimonialization. The findings indicate that gastronomy is increasingly framed as a multidimensional heritage domain in which food memory, ancestry, rituality, and territorial belonging converge. The review also highlights the importance of tradition bearers, especially traditional female cooks and other living custodians of culinary knowledge. A central conclusion is that, although the conceptual literature on food heritage is robust, scholarship specifically focused on Cartagena and Bolívar as culinary heritage sites remains fragmented. The article argues that the gastronomy of the Department of Bolivar should be understood as a territorially grounded and historically layered form of intangible cultural heritage whose continuity depends on living tradition bearers, but whose scholarly visibility remains uneven.