Monarchies are intriguing and persistent, if seemingly anachronistic and aberrant, political, social, ritual and familial institutions that continue to exist and exercise actual and symbolic power to greater or lesser degrees in many countries worldwide.As institutions and as individuals, royalty attracts considerable public interest among the subjects of monarchies and the citizensof non-monarchical republics alike. Public and scholarly attention is often drawn to the extraordinary ritual, formal and ceremonial dimensions of royalty as played out in public life through the media, as well as to their more mundane quotidian activities.Particular royal households and individual monarchs and their roles in a nation’s historical and contemporary socio-political and cultural life are also subject to much scholarly research, popular publications, television series and public interest that, for some enthusiasts, verges on the obsessional. Moreover, the life stories and daily activities of certain contemporary royal families and individuals, however seemingly mundane, attract huge media attention, with their routines, behaviours, relationships, finances and movements subject to detailed, even frenzied media scrutiny and, at times, controversy. Some individual members of royal households attain global mega-celebrity status and even mythical, iconic qualities.Royal personages generally and conspicuously travel a lot and tours, whether as official, state occasions or at leisure also attract considerable attention both at home and abroad.

While generally, if arguably in decline as political and constitutional institutions with extensive powers, monarchies continue to play important embodied and symbolic roles, not least in connection with tourism in countries where royalty continues to exist (or existed in the past and is now treated as part of a heritage tourism product), and in places that may lay claim to past royal associations or are favoured with recent or regular royal visits.