Diversification and differentiation of traditional tourist destinations through the valorization of industrial heritage: challenges and opportunities for industrial tourism in the Costa Blanca (Spain)
Diversification and differentiation of traditional tourist destinations through the valorization of industrial heritage: challenges and opportunities for industrial tourism in the Costa Blanca (Spain)
Diversificación y diferenciación de los destinos turísticos tradicionales a partir de la valorización del patrimonio industrial: retos y oportunidades para el turismo industrial en la Costa Blanca (España)
Fonte: Journal of Tourism & Development; 2012: E1; 121-132
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Resumo: Situated in the Mediterranean seaboard, the tourist area of the Costa Blanca constitutes one of the Spanish regions of greater tourist weight, according to offer and demand variables. The destination image, associated fundamentally to climatic and coastal factors, presents a marked residential-tourist character of expansionary occupation of the territory, that for several years begins to show the symptoms of own stagnation of the mature tourist destinations that, from the theory of the Butler’s life cycle of the tourist product, indicates the precise moment that it is necessary to act with the introduction of diverse strategies to avoid the decline and the loss of territorial competitiveness.This region, due to its geographic location, its natural variety and its people creativity, has innumerable elements of the historical heritage, fruit of a full path of events, that allows it to conserve numerous elements related with the productive history of some villages that have been known, taking advantage of the resources of the nature to develop industries in diverse sectors and with interesting results.In the current tourist context of maximum competitiveness in all scales, the new tendencies of the demand in the motivations and forms of consumption, situate in the first plane of comparative advantages the heritage elements that reflect the identity of the villages and, therefore, also the differentiation of the tourist destinations with regard to its competitors. In this stage, there seems to be the correct time to claim the leadership of industrial heritage and generate new tourist products that diversify and complement the current tourist structure of the destinations.Nevertheless, the opportunity to carry out the tourist valorisation of the industrial heritage, like prime matter for thecreation of attractive and viable cultural offers, turns into a true challenge, when they analyse all the variables that have to be present in the planning of a suitable tourist system so it can became a reality. The heritage resources, by itself, cannot be assimilated into tourist products, and the strategies to attain it involve the participation of a lot of factors of the tourist system and of the consensus of crowd of agents in the creation of a tourist offer linked to the industrial heritage.Along these pages, we intend to describe the current situation with regard to the development of the industrial tourismin Costa Blanca, like an example of a common diagnostic to a lot of other tourist spaces consolidated. To analyse the potentialities and present a diagnostic of the situation from a participatory methodology, is the start of this contribution that concludes with a series of proposals of performance that offer the guidelines of work to attain, in the first place the creation and afterwards the feasibility, of a product of industrial tourism in the Alicante Costa Blanca.
