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The historical development of built heritage awareness and conservation policies: a comparison of two World Heritage Sites: Edinburgh and Salvador do Bahia

  • Published: 09 November 2010
  • Volume 77 , pages 399–415, ( 2012 )

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built heritage tourism

  • Harry Smith 1 &
  • Emilio José Luque-Azcona 2  

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Values regarding built heritage have developed historically in response to both international agendas and local circumstances, and have underpinned the creation of World Heritage Sites and regeneration approaches within these. Such regeneration processes are an arena where different interests meet and often confront each other, with concepts and values of built heritage being used to different ends by the actors involved. However, the origins of conservation concepts and approaches are seldom considered. This paper examines the historical development of built heritage awareness and conservation policies from an institutionalist perspective at the international, European and Latin. American levels. It then considers conservation policies in Scotland and Brazil, particularly in the central areas in Edinburgh and Salvador from the 19th century to the 1970s, and the growing awareness of built heritage among certain sections of society and local institutions in these localities. Finally, the paper analyses the reasons behind, and types of, interventions in Edinburgh’s Old Town and Salvador’s Pelourinho and Maciel neighbourhoods, and the level of awareness of built heritage among the general population in the two cities. The paper draws conclusions on the influence of various factors on the development of approaches to built heritage and on the different ways in which these contributed to a particular awareness of built heritage in Edinburgh and Salvador.

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This period of organisation building at the international level included the creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the International Council of Museums (ICOM) in 1946, the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) in 1959, and the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) in 1965. Within the European context, in 1954 the member states of the Council of Europe (created in 1949) signed the European Cultural Convention, which established the general principles that have since defined common European policy on cultural matters and have had a great impact internationally. In Latin America, 1957 saw the establishment of the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), with the support of UNESCO and several Latin American governments, whose wide remit includes urban issues and the analysis of historic centres.

For example at the UK level: Ancient Monuments Society in 1924, Georgian Group in 1937, Civic Trust in 1957 and Victorian Society in 1958. At the Scottish level: Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland and Old Edinburgh Club in 1908, The National Trust for Scotland in 1931, and The Saltire Society.

Such as Cockburn Association, Saltire Society, Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland, Edinburgh Architectural Association, Old Edinburgh Club, Society of Scottish Artist and the Georgian Group of London.

‘Republica Velha’, or ‘Old Republic’, was the period of Brazilian history from 1889 to 1930, politically characterised by the dominance of agrarian elites from Minas Gerais, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. In economic terms this was the period of consolidation of the country’s coffee exporting economy, as well as of industrialisation (Perissinotto 1994 ).

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Ministry of Science and Education in Spain, and supported by the School of the Built Environment at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh.

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Harry Smith

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Smith, H., Luque-Azcona, E.J. The historical development of built heritage awareness and conservation policies: a comparison of two World Heritage Sites: Edinburgh and Salvador do Bahia. GeoJournal 77 , 399–415 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-010-9391-5

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Discover Trinidad & Tobago

Discover Trinidad & Tobago

Destination Guide | Travel & Vacation Planner

Touring Trinidad’s natural & built heritage

Trinidad offers a wealth of natural (forests, savannahs, reefs, and wetlands) and built heritage (colonial mansions and estate homes, churches and cathedrals, mosques, mandirs, forts, and museums) to explore

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Pink poui around Stollmeyer's Castle, Trinidad. Photo: Martin Farinha

For the history buff (whether human or natural), there are a great many archaeological and historical sites in Trinidad and Tobago . T&T has been moving toward preserving both our natural heritage (forests, savannahs, reefs, and wetlands) and built heritage (colonial mansions and estate homes, churches and cathedrals, mosques, mandirs, forts, museums, and other sites of historical significance).

Many buildings that have survived are in the process of being protected and preserved by the National Trust as national heritage sites with legal protected status. Those which have been officially listed as heritage sites or which appear on their Heritage Asset Register (the second of an eight-step process before which a site can become an official, legally protected Heritage Site) are indicated with the + symbol in this article. Some protected sites require permission to access from one of several state authorities, which reputable guides can arrange.

These historic buildings tell the story of the people who shaped the island, while our landscape, flora and fauna tell the story of Trinidad’s unique mix of Caribbean and South American lineage. Trinidad owes its phenomenal diversity of flora, fauna and topography to this distinctive combination of island and continental characteristics (the island was originally connected to the South American mainland). The result is an exciting blend of island and continental ecology, a distinctive legacy that is visible all around — mountain ranges (the northern, central and southern) cloaked in tropical rainforest; mangrove swamps; savannahs; waterfalls and rivers; and distinct coastal waters that are sometimes jungle green, aqua blue, and deep, dark blue, washed by the nutrient-rich waters of Venezuela’s Orinoco River. There are coral reefs off the northwest and northeast coasts, with rocky, windy islands off the Chaguaramas peninsula , featuring coves, caves and beaches. Caroni (on the west coast ) and Nariva (in the southeast ) are the two main swamps.

Read on to learn more about how you can see and explore the rich natural and built heritage Trinidad has to offer.

built heritage tourism

Fort George . Photo by Adrian Bernard

Around Port of Spain

Angostura museum and barcant butterfly collection.

Located on Eastern Main Road/Trinity Avenue, Laventille. View the famous collection of Trinidad’s colourful butterflies, including the beautiful Blue Emperor. Hear the history of the company’s unique bitters, tour the manufacturing room, bottling plant and distillery and sample some of Angostura’s much-loved rums. Tours begin at 9.30am and 1.30pm, Monday to Friday and last approximately two hours; advance booking required. www.facebook.com/AngosturaMuseumAndBarcantButterflyCollection

+Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception

The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. Photo: Stephen Broadbridge

The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. Photo: Stephen Broadbridge

Recently refurbished and standing at the eastern end of the Brian Lara Promenade downtown, this Catholic cathedral was built between 1816 and 1832.

Designated as a minor basilica, one of its most distinctive features is its stained-glass windows, which depict Trinidad ’s history.

+Cathedral of the Holy Trinity

Completed in 1818 in the Gothic revival style, with its hammerbeam roof made of local wood, this is one of several historic buildings overlooking Woodford Square.

+Holy Rosary Church

Also undergoing restoration works, this Gothic revival church near the eastern end of Park Street dates back to 1866. Like the Cathedral downtown, its stained glass is absolutely stunning.

The Marionettes perform at a fundraiser for Holy Rosary Church. Photo: Maria Nunes

The Marionettes perform at a fundraiser for Holy Rosary Church. Photo: Maria Nunes

Emperor Valley Zoo and the +Botanical Gardens

Giraffes at the Emperor Valley Zoo. Copyright MEP Publishers

Melman and Mandela are popular additions to the Emperor Valley Zoo in Port of Spain . Photographed by MEP Publishers

Also around the Savannah, along its northern side, the Zoo was opened in 1952 and recently upgraded. Its nearly 3 hectares house hundreds of animals. Tigers, giraffes, lions, macaws and lots of snakes. Kids will love it. The young giraffes are adorable and the new lions and tigers are big draws.

Get a good look at some of the many species of monkeys, parrots, macaws, snakes, fish and reptiles that inhabit the forests of this land. Open every day exept Christmas and carnival . Admission: Adults TT$30, children TT$15, 8am–5:30pm (weekdays) and 8am–6:00pm (weekends). www.zstt.org

Trinidad's Botanical Gardens. Photo: Ayanna Young

Trinidad’s Botanical Gardens. Photo: Ayanna Young

The nearby Gardens (est. 1820) are a favourite for picnics and walks, and home to one of the oldest collections of exotic plants and trees in the western hemisphere. Next door is the President’s   House official home, which has recently undergone significant restoration work.

+President’s House

built heritage tourism

The President’s House. Photo by RAPSO Imaging, courtesy the Office of the President of Trinidad & Tobago

Along the northern flank, the Botanic Gardens and the Zoo adjoin the stately and recently refurbished President’s House — fronted by its own manicured gardens. The site — with its original structure called “the Cottage” — was used as the Governor’s residence from 1867, and the current structure replaced the Cottage in 1876. After the islands became a republic in 1976, the building was designated as the President’s House, and became the official residence of the president (which it remains). Key architectural details include its blue limestone facade, Welsh Ditchess slate roof, Victorian columns and railings, and Victorian Italianate style arched portals and loggias.

The roundabout beyond gives access to the suburbs of St Ann’s and Cascade (on the left, with the iconic performing arts facility Queen’s Hall on the left, and the Prime Minister’s Residence & Diplomatic Centre just after), and the Lady Young Road which snakes over the foothills to join the highway out of the city heading east.

+Fort George

Fort George, Trinidad. Photo by Chris Anderson

Fort George, Trinidad. Photo by Chris Anderson

High in the hills overlooking  Port of Spain , the Gulf of Paria, west Trinidad and  Central Trinidad  is Fort George. The British landed on this coast in 1797 and snatched the island from Spain. Fort George (1804), 1,100ft above Port of Spain, became the main defence against attack. But it never experienced any military action, was decommissioned in 1846 and become a signal station in 1883. Original cannon, cannon balls and part of the dungeon remain. But the real attraction now is the panoramic view (the hills to the west are Venezuela’s Paria peninsula).  Open 10am to 6pm, admission free.

Gingerbread houses

History buffs will find cannons and other relics scattered throughout the island. The gingerbread house has delicate wooden filigree, jalousie windows, peaked roofs, dormers and a gallery.  George Brown , a Scottish architect who came to Trinidad in 1880, created the gingerbread style, which can be found across the island, in remnants of stately mansions once owned by planters and merchants, as well as the humble cottages of the working class. Among the most notable is the aptly named George Brown House (Victoria Avenue and Queen’s Park West), which brown himself designed in 1888 for the Seigert family. Brown’s daughter, Jessie Simpson, and her husband bought it from them in 1941.

Quite a few other gingerbread houses can be seen in Woodbrook, the western suburb of Port of Spain that is now the liming hub of the country. A living museum of architecture , this former sugar estate became a respectable suburb for a new emerging middle class in the early 1900s. Belmont, to the east of the Queen’s Park Savannah, has also held on to some of its beautiful old homes, which are in remarkably good condition.

+Knowsley House

Knowsley house in Trinidad. Photo by Chris Anderson

Knowsley house in Trinidad. Photo by Chris Anderson

Occupying the block between Chancery Lane, Dundonald Street and Albion Lane, on the southern side of the Savannah, this is another heritage building which has been beautifully restored within recent years (2011). Originally designed and built in 1904 by Taylor & Gillies for William Gordon, its structure features imported yellow bricks and hand hewn local limestone, with Italian marble on the ground floor veranda, plaster of Paris on the ground floor ceilings, and a magnificent interior staircase built from Guyanese purple heart wood. In June 1956, Kowsley was purchased by the government of Trinidad and Tobago for use as offices for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

+Magnificent Seven

Queen's Royal College, Trinidad. Photo: Ariann Thompson

Queen’s Royal College, Trinidad. Photo: Ariann Thompson

Described as the lungs of the city, the Savannah is a hub of recreational activity. Its vast grounds are popular for sports, kite-flying (especially around Easter ), and even photo shoots. Walkers, joggers, dog-walkers, and food /drink vendors (including a series of colourful Carnival stalls in season) dominate its perimeter. The Savannah is said to be the world’s largest roundabout (approximately 3.5km and 260 acres) and the Caribbean’s oldest recreation ground. Originally part of the Paradise Estate, a portion of land in the centre remains a burial ground for members of the Peschier family (its previous owners); it was converted into a city park in 1817.

A row of grand old houses on the western side of the Savannah were built between 1900 and 1910. The most southerly is Queen’s Royal College , whose most famous alumna is Nobel Prize-winning writer (and quintessential Trini) VS Naipaul. Hayes Court was the residence of the Anglican Bishop of Trinidad and Tobago and is still the property of the Anglican Church. It is currently under renovation. Next door is Mille Fleurs , which was built in 1904 for the Prada family. It was bought by the government in 1979 and has benefitted from significant restoration work.

Roomor , originally known as Ambard’s House, was commissioned by a cocoa merchant. It is the only one of the seven still functioning as a private residence. Just three doors down from the Anglican bishop’s residence is the home of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Port of Spain . The building has been renovated and is used by the church.

Whitehall was, until 2008, the office of the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago since shortly after independence. It has also received significant restoration work, with plans for it to be used as a Protocol House for visiting dignitaries.

The northernmost of the seven, Killarney or Stollmeyer’s Castle . It remained the property of the Stollmeyer family until the 1970s and was eventually bought by the government in 1979. It has recently been refurbished.

+National Museum & Art Gallery

The National Museum & Art Gallery. Photographer: Aisha Provoteaux

The National Museum & Art Gallery. Photographer: Aisha Provoteaux

Though not part of the Queen’s Park Savannah’s Magnificent Seven , the National Museum and Art Gallery is housed in a building of significance. Established as the Royal Victoria Institute, in honour of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, the building is an example of the German Renaissance architectural style. The more celebrated example of this style in Trinidad – and no more than a stroll away from the museum – is Queen’s Royal College. The two buildings share a common architect: Daniel M. Hahn, an old boy of QRC, who received training in Germany. Today, the building houses both the national art collection and a history collection comprising artefacts from the country’s earliest known Amerindian settlements to (almost) the present day. Admission is free, and the museum is open from Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 6pm.

Two smaller museums in Port of Spain complement the main collection:

  • The Museum of the City of Port of Spain: A collection designed to narrate the history of Trinidad’s capital. Opening hours: Tuesday to Friday, 9am to 5pm. Fort San Andres, South Quay, Port of Spain (opposite City Gate bus terminal). Tel: 623 5941/624 6477/623 0339 [Closed for refurbishment works, with April/May 2020 the projected date for re-opening]
  • Police Service Museum: There has been a Police Force in Trinidad since 1592, established by the Spanish. For its first two hundred years, however, it was never more than half-a-dozen strong. It is bigger, and busier, now. Opening hours: Tuesday to Thursday, 9am to 5pm; Saturday, 10am to 3pm. Old Police Headquarters, St Vincent St, Port of Spain. Tel: 624 6722

The Red House, seat of the T&T parliament, in Port of Spain. Photographer: Marc Seyon

The Red House, seat of the T&T parliament, in Port of Spain. Photographer: Marc Seyon

Reopened in early 2020, and undergoing the very final stages of major restoration works, the original building was constructed between 1944 and 1948, modified in 1892, and the government offices painted red in 1897 to mark Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee — therefore earning the name by which it became known: the Red House. The original building burnt down in 1903 during the Water Riots. With Daniel Hahn as architect, the Red House was rebuilt with some alterations (including neoclassical ornamentation) using most of the external walls, and reopened in 1907. It houses the nation’s Parliament, which was temporarily relocated to the International Waterfront Centre during the renovations. A First Peoples burial ground was recently found at the site, including remains and artefacts (430–1400 AD).

+Woodford Square Heritage District

The fountain in Woodford Square, Port of Spain, Trinidad. Photo: Ryan Kong

The fountain in Woodford Square, Port of Spain, Trinidad. Photo: Ryan Kong

Several distinct buildings overlook historic Woodford Square, which has been designated as the Woodford Square Heritage District. The Square was established in 1917 by Mayor Dr E Prada and named after Sir Ralph James Woodford, the British governor who contributed significantly to the development of Port of Spain. In the years leading up to independence in 1962, Dr Eric Williams (the islands’ first prime minister) and the People’s National Movement used Woodford Square for their public rallies, with the Square coming to be known colloquially as the “University of Woodford Square”. Restoration of the water fountain — showing Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love, and her son Eros — was nearing completion in early 2020.

The buildings surrounding the Square are equally notable. Completed in 1818 in the Gothic revival style, with its hammerbeam roof made of local wood, is the Anglican +Cathedral of the Holy Trinity . The Hall of Justice lies to the north; the +Old Fire Station and National Library (originally built in 1897, then refurbished and integrated into the new Library) to the west, across the road from the + Red House (originally built in 1844, formerly the seat of Parliament, but currently being restored — work has been slowed by the discovery of First Peoples remains and artefacts dating to 430–1400 AD); and the remains of the razed Greyfriars Church to the east.

The Bamboo Cathedral in Chaguaramas. Photo by Chris Anderson

The Bamboo Cathedral in Chaguaramas . Photo by Chris Anderson

+Chaguaramas

Boats, parties, hiking , biking, history, restaurants , water-sports, beach-bumming, golfing … or just lazing on the Boardwalk or under magnificent samaan trees. The Chaguaramas National Heritage Park is home to all this. It is managed by the Chaguaramas Development Authority (CDA, chaguaramas.com ) , which also provides onshore and offshore tours.

Some highlights:

  • The +Bamboo Cathedral is a lush, serene and easy walk beneath a long and beautiful stretch of arching bamboo forest canopy — unless you plan to trek uphill to the top of Morne Catherine with its abandoned + World War II tracking station (a popular spot for astronomers and star-gazers)
  • Also in beautiful +Tucker Valley is +Edith Falls — located in an abandoned cocoa estate nestled against the eastern side of Morne Catherine and overlooking the golf course. A fairly gentle hike , you will hear red howler monkeys in the forest canopy along the trail.
  • Military & Aviation Museum: chronicles the military history of the country from 1498 to the present. Admission fee; guided tours available upon request (militarymuseumtt.com).

The Gasparee Caves, Trinidad. Photo: Stephen Broadbridge

The Gasparee Caves, Trinidad. Photo: Stephen Broadbridge

Down-de-islands (“DDI”)

Going “down de islands” (DDI) is a favourite jaunt for those owning or renting holiday homes, or dropping anchor in one of the coves or bays. There are three sets of islands off the northwest coast, each with distinct features and histories:

  • the Five Islands (of which there are actually six); the Diego Islands ; and then Gaspar Grande, Monos, Huevos, and +Chacachacare
  • +Nelson Island , one of the Five, was used to quarantine indentured immigrants
  • Gaspar Grande has the stunning + Gasparee Caves , formed by a coral reef pushed up from the sea. Water has since eroded the limestone, creating dramatic stalactites, stalagmites, earth pillars and a massive blue-green pool, lit by sunlight from a hole above
  • +Chacachacare has a salt pond, a lighthouse and, most famously, a leprosarium, now defunct. The remains of the chapel and dwellings of the ministering nuns are still there
  • Carrera , one of the Diego pair, has been a prison island.

Lopinot estate and historical complex in Trinidad. Photo: William Barrow

The beautiful Lopinot estate and historical complex in Trinidad. Featured on the Ghost Hunters International television show, it is said to be haunted, with the Compte de Lopinot riding the estate on his horse at the full moon. Photo: William Barrow

The Northeast

+asa wright nature centre and lodge.

The rare oilbird is the only nocturnal, fruit-eating bird in the world. Asa Wright has the country's most accessible colony of them, while Cumaca (pictured), has the largest. Photo by Chris Anderson

The rare oilbird is the only nocturnal, fruit-eating bird in the world. Asa Wright has the country’s most accessible colony of them, while Cumaca (pictured), has the largest. Photo by Chris Anderson

Nestled at the head of the Arima valley, this is birdwatchers ’ paradise, and a conservation and study centre for professional and amateur naturalists . Off the Arima-Blanchisseuse Road, this is one of Trinidad’s most outstanding bird-watching and eco-centres; the New York Zoological Society established a research station here in 1949. Originally a coffee, citrus and cocoa plantation (now partially reclaimed by secondary forest), the estate and its carefully preserved great house, Springhill, were bought in 1947 by a retired English solicitor, Dr Newcome Wright, and his Icelandic wife Asa. When Newcome died, Mrs Wright sold the land on condition that it remained a conservation area; a non-profit trust was set up in 1967. The century-old great house has been preserved, and houses a dining hall and an open verandah for observation, especially of birds.

The Centre now spans 1,500 acres in the Arima and Aripo Valleys of the Northern Range. Its eco-lodge, veranda, restaurant and reception are open to day visitors: the admission covers a half-mile guided tour and some access to the grounds (including a fresh-water pool that you can bathe in). Overnight visitors enjoy greater access to the trails and caves, including the rare oilbirds’ habitat at Dunston Cave . This is perhaps the most easily accessible colony of these rare, nocturnal, fruit-eating birds to be found anywhere. Some 166 species of birds have been spotted at the Centre — hummingbirds , bananaquits, honeycreepers, and tanagers are the most common. Books on T&T’s natural environment are on sale at the gift shop. asawright.org

+Toco Lighthouse at Galera Point

Galera Point at dawn. Photo by Chris Anderson

Galera Point at dawn. Photo by Chris Anderson

There’s a rocky outcrop at Galera Point, just beyond the Keshorn Walcott Toco Lighthouse (1877) at the northeastern tip of the island. Here two great bodies of water meet: the Atlantic Ocean to the east, the Caribbean Sea to the west, with a distinct demarcation in colour. It is also here that Amerindians, fleeing the Spanish occupiers after the Arena uprising in 1699, are said to have thrown themselves into the water rather than suffer further oppression. In February, Orisha devotees celebrate the Olukun Festival here. There is a small picnic area.

Lopinot Historical Complex

The river at Lopinot. Photographer: Marc Seyon

The river at Lopinot. Photographer: Marc Seyon

Nestled in the Northern Range off the Eastern Main Road near Arouca, Lopinot was originally developed (1806) as a cocoa estate by a French count, Charles Joseph de Lopinot, who had fled to Trinidad in 1791 to escape the Haitian revolution. +Lopinot House comprises the former tapia estate house, prison and slave quarter, which have been turned into a museum. The area is popular for picnics, family days, retreats, sports, bird-watching and hiking (there is a river and also caves nearby). The village residents are a quintessentially Trini mix of First Peoples, Spanish, French, African and East Indian heritage, and remain close to the land. Some still speak Spanish, French and patois . At Christmas time, the area is a hub for parang and pastelles. At any time of year, make sure to take in the delights at Café Mariposa. Legend has it that on dark, stormy nights the count appears on a black horse dressed in military regalia and gallops across the Lopinot savannah. After a visit in 2011, TV show Ghost Hunters International (SYFY Channel in the US) reported that they had found more evidence of paranormal activity here than anywhere else in the world.

+Mount St Benedict

The Christ the Redeemer statue at Mount St Benedict. Photographer: Owen Washington

The Christ the Redeemer statue at Mount St Benedict. Photographer: Owen Washington

Perched 245m/800ft above the central plain, off St John’s Road in Tunapuna, Mount St Benedict is the oldest and largest Benedictine monastery in the Caribbean. The 600-acre complex includes a nature park with walkways and trails, perfect for hiking, bird-watching and enjoying the magnificent views. The Pax Guesthouse offers accommodation, a tea-house and terraces for bird-watching. The monks make and sell yoghurt, and the Pax Abbey Shop sells religious items. Afternoon tea is available.

UWI Zoology Museum

Banwari Man, Trinidad. Photo: Desiree Seebaran

Banwari Man, Trinidad. Photo: Desiree Seebaran

Based at the University of the West Indies’ St Augustine campus, this is the largest and most significant collection of zoological specimens in the country. The Banwari Man is also preserved here — the human skeleton found lying in a crouched burial position by the T&T Historical Society in 1969, and still the oldest evidence of human activity on Caribbean soil. The area in which it was found (Banwari Trace — see below under South Trinidad) has yielded artefacts belonging to the Ortoiroid people, dating back to 5,000 BC. Tours of the Museum can be booked 8am–4pm, Monday–Friday. Admission: free.  facebook.com/uwizoologymuseum , 662-2002 x 82231

Yerette: home of the hummingbird

An Amethyst woodstar humminbird at Yerette. This tiny bird first appeared in Trinidad in 2015. Photo by Wendell Stephen Jay Reyes

An Amethyst woodstar humminbird at Yerette. This tiny bird first appeared in Trinidad in 2015. Photo by Wendell Stephen Jay Reyes

This is a chance to sit and have tea surrounded by hummingbirds. The Fergusons allow visitors to take tours of their garden in Maracas St Joseph, where 15 species of hummingbirds have been photographed, along with scores of other birds.

There are three tours daily. Meals featuring cuisine made with all-local ingredients and all-natural local juices are also available. yerette.com

The Temple in the Sea at Waterloo at sunset. Photo by Nyla Singh

The Temple in the Sea at Waterloo at sunset. Photo by Nyla Singh

Central Trinidad

+hanuman murti and +dattatreya yoga centre.

The Dattatreya Yoga Centre near Chaguanas. Photographer: Marc Seyon

The Dattatreya Yoga Centre near Chaguanas. Photographer: Marc Seyon

Churches, temples, kingdom halls, mandirs, faith centres and mosques stand side by side in the Trinidad landscape. One of the most impressive structures is the 26m/85ft statue of the Hindu god Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god of strength, donated by an Indian swami, and the tallest of its kind outside India. Consecrated in 2003, it towers over the adjoining Dattatreya Yoga Centre mandir and ashram at Orange Field Road.

Nariva Swamp & +Bush-Bush Sanctuary

Kayaking in Nariva swamp. Photo by Stephen Broadbridge

Kayaking in Nariva swamp . Photo by Stephen Broadbridge

One of Trinidad’s most significant wildlife areas and (like the Caroni Swamp) a Ramsar Site, Nariva is the only place in Trinidad to see the endangered manatee or sea cow, which can grow up to 3m/10ft in length, weighing about 900kg/1,985lbs. There are also resident red howler monkeys, anteaters, porcupines, capuchin monkeys, caiman and birds like the orange-winged parrot, yellow-capped Amazon parrot, savannah hawk, agoutis, tegus, cascadura (armoured catfish), anacondas (the heaviest reptile in the world, and the longest in the Americas, which can grow up to 9m/30ft long), and other endangered species like red-bellied macaws and owls. At the Bush Bush Wildlife Sanctuary you will find channel-billed toucans and tree-climbing porcupine. Scarlet ibis also roost here. You will need a tour guide and permit to explore the swamp, by kayak, boat or (in the dry months) on foot.

+Our Lady of Montserrat church

Known for its beautiful stained glass windows, bought in France over 100 years ago, this little wooden church is located high on a ridge of the Central Range in the village of Tortuga. It is one of the most wonderful places to watch the sunset as it faces westward towards the Gulf of Paria . This Roman Catholic church was built by its first priest and architect, Fr Marie Jules Dupoux, and blessed on 24 December, 1878. A special festival is held every year on the Sunday nearest to 8 September and is attended by hundreds from all over Trinidad. It’s also known for the wooden figure of the Black Virgin.

+Temple in the Sea at Waterloo

The Temple in the Sea at Waterloo. Photo by Rapso Imaging

The Temple in the Sea at Waterloo. Photo by Rapso Imaging

Off the Southern Main Road — 150m/500ft out into the Gulf of Paria at the end of a causeway — lies the “floating mandir”. It’s the reconstruction of a Hindu temple built single-handedly over 25 post-war years by Siewdass Sadhu, a sugar labourer (whose statue is in the temple’s parking lot). Forbidden to build a temple on land, he built it in the sea instead, beyond the control of colonial officials and land owners. The effect of sea erosion prevented Sadhu from completing it, but in 1994, the government finished it in time to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the first arrival of Indian indentured workers. At low tide, the mudflats around the temple are excellent for bird-watching. The causeway is generally open 6am–6pm: the temple itself is open at the caretaker’s discretion.

+Winston Nanan Caroni Swamp & Bird Sanctuary

The River Caroni at the Caroni Swamp. Photographer: Maria Huggins

The River Caroni at the Caroni Swamp. Photographer: Maria Huggins

This is one of Trinidad’s most popular eco attractions — home and roosting ground of the stunning scarlet ibis, Trinidad’s national bird, plus 100 other species of birds, anteaters, raccoons, caimans, snakes and opossums. It was recognised in the 1996 Ramsar Convention as a wetland of international importance, placing a legal obligation on the government to ensure the area is protected and maintained.

The roughly 60sq km sanctuary, just off the Solomon Hochoy Highway in Central Trinidad , comprises tidal lagoons, marshland and mangrove forest bordering the Gulf of Paria , between the mouth of the Caroni and Madame Espagnole rivers. You can buy tickets for boat tours on site (many boat tours depart at 4pm to catch flocks of ibis coming home to roost, though some can be booked all day), or arrange with a reputable tour company. Kayak tours are also available.

+Tamana Bat Caves

Tamana Bat Caves in Trinidad's Central Range. Photo by Stephen Broadbridge

Tamana Bat Caves in Trinidad’s Central Range. Photo by Stephen Broadbridge

A series of lengthy limestone cave systems in Mount Tamana (the highest of the Montserrat Hills) is home to huge colonies of bats (12 different species), thousands strong, which leave the caverns en masse to feed before dusk. Some claim there can be over a million. Go with a reputable, experienced guide who can ensure both your safety and minimal impact on the natural environment.

Photo courtesy the Pointe-à-Pierre Wildfowl Trust

Ducks in the lake at the Pointe-à-Pierre Wildfowl Trust . Photo courtesy the Pointe-à-Pierre Wildfowl Trust

South Trinidad

+banwari trace.

The oldest evidence of human activity on Caribbean soil is in Trinidad: the archaeological site at Banwari Trace has yielded artefacts dating back to 5,000 BC. These were once the belongings of the Ortoiroid people, named after the Ortoire river. “Banwari Man”, the human skeleton found lying in a crouched burial position by the Trinidad & Tobago Historical Society Society in 1969, is preserved at the University of the West Indies (St. Augustine). Banwari Trace was included in the 2004 World Monuments Watch by the World Monuments Fund. Access requires permission from the National Trust.

+Devil’s Woodyard Mud Volcano

There’s nothing to be afraid of here, at Trinidad’s most visited and accessible mud volcano. Located about 30 minutes east of San Fernando (there is another active and accessible site in Piparo), these are small volcano-shaped cones of mud and clay, usually less than 1–2m/3–7ft tall. Cousins of the sulphur spring, they are formed by hot water and fine sediment spilling from a vent in the ground like lava. European settlers in Trinidad believed that the sound of the mud bubbling below the surface was the sound of the devil stockpiling wood: hence the name. Some Hindus consider it a sacred spot and worship here. For the most part, local mud volcanoes splutter and bubble harmlessly, or lapse into inactivity, but do erupt occasionally (with varying intensity). There are recreational facilities on site.

built heritage tourism

Pitch Lake . Photo by RAPSO Imaging

+Pitch Lake at La Brea

About 90 minutes from Port of Spain, this extraordinary natural phenomenon may look like an enormous car park after a rain shower, but is in fact the largest of only three natural asphalt lakes in the world (the other two are in Venezuela and Los Angeles).

Ever-replenished by bitumen oozing from a geological fault (a 12x12m/40x40ft hole refills within three days), this 95-acre, 107m/350ft deep “lake” has been mined and its fine asphalt exported since 1859, supplying roads and airport runways around the world. Most of the surface is firm enough to walk on, though some spots are too soft for traffic. Natural springs, reputed to have healing properties, appear at the centre during the rainy season. You will see small bubbling puddles and smell the gases that escape from within.

Legend has it that a tribe of First Peoples was swallowed by the lake as punishment for eating hummingbirds, which hosted the spirits of their ancestors. In fact, this slow-motion “black hole” constantly pulls things into itself, and is said to have “feelers” stretching outward for several miles, veins of pitch extending from the main lake. A small museum houses artefacts recovered from the lake. La Brea Pitch Lake Tour Guides Association: 651-1232

+Pointe-à-Pierre Wildfowl Trust & Oropouche Lagoon

Anhingas at Pointe-à-Pierre Wildfowl Trust. Photo by Chris Anderson

Anhingas at Pointe-à-Pierre Wildfowl Trust. Photo by Chris Anderson

Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, the Wildfowl Trust is a must-see for any nature-lover, or anyone wanting a restorative retreat. Located about 45 minutes south of Port of Spain, on the Petrotrin refinery grounds at Pointe-à-Pierre, this non-profit Trust encompasses 32 hectares and two fresh-water lakes, with free-roaming wildlife and enclosed breeding areas.

It’s the only eco-centre in the world located within an oil refinery complex. Over 86 species have been recorded here. The aviculture programmes breed five endangered waterfowl species (wild ducks) as well as the scarlet ibis (the national bird), and the blue and gold macaw. Visitors can get close to these beautiful birds. Over the years, the Trust has bred and released several thousand birds back into the wild.

Wooden walkways take you right around two lakes, which are full of water lilies and lotus flowers, and there are several natural walks and interpretive trails including Faerie Woods, Forest Walk and Devil’s Ear Trail. The learning centre at the entrance provides a photographic display of the reserve’s plant life, insects, shells, and a small First Peoples Museum. For those wanting to stay overnight, the Trust’s Petrea Place offers lodging and meals.

Over its 50 years, the Trust has been a pioneering force for environmental conservation, education, and sustainable development. It will be celebrating its landmark achievements from November 2015 to November 2016. Reservations are required to visit. 658-4200 x 2512, 612-2463 , papwildfowltrust.org

+San Fernando Hill

The San Fernando Hill. Photo by Chris Anderson

The San Fernando Hill. Photo by Chris Anderson

Once a sacred Amerindian site known as Naparima, the San Fernando Hill stands like a monument, a green one, in the midst of all the industry and construction of south Trinidad. From the top you can see why San Fernando seems even more crowded and busier than Port of Spain: this is the commercial hub of the energy industries in the south-west of the island (you can see the Pointe-à-Pierre refinery to the north), on which much of T&T’s enormous wealth is based. The town has spread in all directions and up here, parakeets and other birds have found shelter in the trees. Visitor facilities, lookouts, picnic huts and a children’s play park make this a lovely location for a family outing, and it is one of the main event venues in the city.

To get to San Fernando Hill, leave the highway at the San Fernando exit, turn left onto the San Fernando bypass, and at its crest take a right turn; almost immediately Circular Road branches off to the right, and by Soong’s Great Wall restaurant a small signposted road on the left climbs the hill almost to the summit.

Vintage car museum

Vintage Red T Ford. Courtesy Angelo Bissessarsingh

At the Brij Maharaj Auto & Heritage Museum in San Fernando you will find one of only four Chervolet Phaetons known to still exist in the world today, part of a remarkable collection of antiques that includes the country’s oldest working car, a Model T Ford, with a manufacture date circa 1917. Courtesy Angelo Bissessarsingh

For more than 40 years San Fernando businessman Brij Maharaj has been collecting antique cars and restoring them. Among his collection are historically important automobiles, including the oldest working vehicle in the country – a 1918 Ford Model T Runabout. Many of his cars are the only examples of their kind locally; while two are believed to be the only ones in the world today. The museum also has a collection of antique motorcycles, bicycles and vintage automobile collectibles.

Brij Maharaj Auto & Heritage Museum , 2 Hubert Rance Street, Vistabella. Open to the public once a month by appointment. Admission: free. brijmaharajmuseum@gmail.com

African Legacy Tours

These inspiring and educational tours take in sites of African heritage across the two islands. Africans were first brought here in 1606 to work on tobacco plantations. However, most came in 1783 with the plantation owners of islands that the French had claimed. Emancipation was proclaimed at the Treasury Building in Port of Spain by Governor George Hill on August 1, 1834; the freedom for which the Africans had ceaselessly fought was finally achieved four years later, on August 1, 1838.

The tours celebrate the rich legacy of the Africans, as well as the contributions of their descendants, to the heritage and culture of Trinidad and Tobago. You will learn about their resistance, Maroonage, Pan Africanism and links to continental Africa, as well as their spirituality and ancient legends, new discoveries and modern heroes. Tel. 461-8637

  • National Trust: 277-6105, www.nationaltrust.tt , or nationaltrust.tt@gmail.com
  • National Museum: 117 Frederick Street, Port of Spain. 623 5941 or 623 0339 or nationalmuseum117@gmail.com
  • Category: Touring — Trinidad
  • Tag: Architecture , Heritage , Sightseeing

Written by Nazma Muller and Caroline Taylor

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  • Open access
  • Published: 17 March 2023

Natural world heritage conservation and tourism: a review

  • Zhenzhen Zhang 1 , 2 ,
  • Kangning Xiong 1 , 2 &
  • Denghong Huang 1 , 2  

Heritage Science volume  11 , Article number:  55 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

6950 Accesses

13 Citations

Metrics details

The trade-off and synergy between heritage conservation and tourism has become the focus of natural world heritage research. To gain a better understanding of the global researches on natural World Heritage conservation and tourism, we comprehensively reviewed relevant peer-reviewed research literature based on Web of Science (WOS) and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI). We find that (1) the theoretical research of natural heritage conservation and tourism has gone through a process from emphasizing the protection of heritage value to pursuing the synergy of heritage protection and tourism development; (2) the main research methods include investigation research methods, indirect research methods and experimental research methods; (3) "3S" technology (remote sensing, geographic information system, global positioning system), three-dimensional laser scanning technology, virtual reality (VR) technology, augmented reality (AR) technology, holographic projection technology and other modern technological means are applied to the protection and tourism development of natural properties; (4) the common coordinated development models include ecological science tourism, community participation in tourism, ecological compensation model, world heritage—buffer zone—surrounding areas coordinated protection model and so on. We analyzed the research progresses through (1) the theories proposed in the literature, (2) the main methods applied to address the issues on natural heritage conservation and tourism, (3) the technologies applied in the researches and (4) the coordinated models of heritage conservation and tourism. Furthermore, we put forward the following research prospects: (1) systematically explore the conservation methods and theories based on world heritage criteria; (2) formulate corresponding conservation systems and ecological restoration standards for different types of world heritage; (3) give full play to the complementary advantages of various research methods and reveal the mutual feedback mechanism between tourism and heritage conservation; (4) develop ecological restoration technology based on biodiversity restoration, establish radial ecological corridor, and expand the benign ecological environment of the properties to wider periphery; (5) build ecological compensation development models based on the perspective of heritage tourism and value realization of world heritage.

Introduction

Natural world heritage sites are natural landscapes recognized by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee and inscribed on the World Heritage List, with Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) such as containing aesthetic importance, representing major stages of earth's history, representing significant on-going ecological and biological processes, containing the most important and significant natural habitats for in-situ conservation of biological diversity [ 1 ]. As the type of protected area with the highest and most representative OUV in the world [ 2 , 3 ], how to pass on the value of the world heritage through heritage display and solve the livelihood problem of the residents is a problem worthy of study.

For many years after the birth of Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (World Heritage Convention) in 1972, conservation was the sole goal of World Heritage, but as time passed, World Heritage gradually established its status as an important tourist destination, and UNESCO’s policy on World Heritage also no longer limited to conservation, but also sustainable tourism [ 4 ]. The purpose of heritage conservation is to preserve their OUV and pass them on intact to the next generation [ 5 ]. The ideal goal of heritage tourism is to awaken people’s attention and respect for cultural history and natural landscapes through tourism activities [ 6 ]. Therefore, heritage tourism is the best way to give full play to the functions of natural World Heritage, which can promote scientific research, social supervision and financial support for heritage conservation, and is also a sustainable way for the social and economic development of natural heritage sites [ 7 ]. However, the unreasonable utilization of tourism resources will lead to the imbalance of resource supply and demand [ 8 ]. In its World Heritage Outlook report, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) pointed out that tourism impact has always been in the top three threats [ 9 , 10 , 11 ]. How to coordinate the relationship between World Heritage conservation and tourism development has always been a hot issue of academic and government attention [ 12 , 13 ].

Currently, international organizations and scholars have carried out a series of fruitful studies, covering the impact of tourism activities on heritage conservation, community residents’ perception of heritage tourism, and changes in the landscape pattern. Among them, the community and tourists are the focus of related research. Natural World Heritage sites are often very fragile. To maintain a certain balance between social ecosystems and natural ecosystems, it is important not only to minimize human disturbance, but also to make tourists aware of the need to protect the OUV and to participate in the conservation and promotion of heritage value [ 14 ]. The sustainability of community livelihoods is the premise of World Heritage conservation, and ecotourism is an important form of enriching the livelihoods of community residents in heritage sites [ 15 ]. Locally-driven responsible and sustainable tourism management in and around World Heritage properties can complement other sources of growth, so as to promote economic diversification between tourism and non-tourism activities. This will strengthen social and economic resilience in a way that also helps protect the OUV of properties [ 16 ]. In addition, some scholars have also paid attention to the impact of tourism activities on the biodiversity [ 17 ], water [ 18 ], geology and landform [ 19 , 20 ] of natural World Heritage sites.

Meanwhile, scholars have systematically sorted out and summarized the concept, research methods, authenticity and integrity, heritage management, stakeholders, knowledge systems and development trends of heritage tourism from the theoretical level [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 ]. It is worth noting that the research on tourism and conservation of natural World Heritage is a field in which natural ecosystems and social ecosystems are highly intertwined, involving tourism, aesthetics, geomorphology, ecology, geography and other disciplines. There are research bottlenecks in terms of theory, method, technology, model and so on. The existing articles indicate that the studies on the conservation and tourism of natural World Heritage start from the theoretical perspective, and most of them are macro-heritage studies, rarely distinguishing between cultural heritage and natural heritage. The research methods are mainly based on questionnaire survey and interview with tourists and community residents, lacking the application of experimental monitoring methods. The comprehensive understanding of related research has not been fully formed in the academic circles.

To gain a comprehensive understanding of natural heritage protection and tourism since the World Heritage Convention came into being half a century ago, we reviewed the relevant research progress of theories, methods, technologies and models from the perspective of the systematic chain from theoretical understanding to practical application, and proposed future research directions based on the research progress. The theory about natural World Heritage conservation and tourism is the understanding of objective things and their laws, and the related theory research will help us understand the law of this study field. The generation and development of the methods depends on our theoretical understanding of related researches. Through the analysis of the methods, it will help to promote our theoretical understanding, and also better guide us to use technical means to improve the heritage protection and tourism sustainability in natural sites. Conducting the analysis of related technologies can effectively promote us to adjust the methods of recognizing natural World Heritage conservation and tourism in practice, thus promoting the development of theory. Meanwhile, technology is a practical means to accelerate the promotion of heritage protection and sustainable tourism. The analysis of related models in this study is the summary of different development paths and practical experiences, reflecting the development models of natural sites in different scenarios. It is expected to provide references for more natural World Heritage sites in the cooperation between heritage protection and tourism.

Materials and methods

The acquisition of journal papers was conducted based on the available databases including Web of Science (WOS) ( https://www.webofscience.com ) and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) ( https://www.cnki.net/ ). To obtain higher quality and more representative articles, we restricted the databases of paper sources during retrieval. In WOS, Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) were taken as the retrieval databases. In CNKI, Science Citation Index (SCI), the Engineering Index (EI), Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI), Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD) source journals were taken as retrieval databases. Acknowledging that the literature on both heritage conservation and tourism in natural World Heritage sites is sparse and our desire to get a wider review, we also included different synonyms. The search item was “them”. The first search terms was set as “natural heritage”, the second search term was set as “tourism”, and the third terms were set as “conservation” or “protection” or “preservation”. The deadline set for our retrieval was December 31, 2022 (Fig.  1 ).

figure 1

The process of the literature search and screening

Firstly, based on the search conditions above, 610 and 144 articles were found in WOS and CNKI, respectively. Then, we set two inclusion criteria: (1) the research them must include both heritage tourism and conservation; (2) the research object must be natural World Heritage site(s) or mixed site(s). Articles without heritage protection or heritage tourism are discarded. Researches about cultural World Heritage, built heritage, intangible cultural heritage, national parks, geoparks, natural reserves or other contents without natural World Heritage are also considered irrelevant and excluded. We decide whether an article meets our inclusion criteria by reading the title, abstract, keywords, and even the full text of the article. After screening based on our inclusion criteria and deduplication, 115 and 85 related articles were obtained from WOS and CNKI, respectively. In term of languages, the final obtained articles include Chinese (85 articles), Croatian (1 articles), English (101 articles), Portuguese (2 articles), Russian (1 articles), Spanish (9 articles), Ukrainian (1 articles).

It is worth noting that the number of search results and the final screening results varied greatly, especially in WOS. This may be because when subject is used as the search term in WOS, any one or more of the titles, abstracts, author keywords and keywords plus contain natural, heritage, conservation or protection or preservation and tourism articles will be retrieved. As a result, there are some documents that are not related to the research topic, such as cultural heritage, protected areas, national parks, natural resources, in the search results.

Research progress

The theoretical research on natural heritage protection and tourism has gone through a process from emphasizing heritage value protection to pursuing synergy between heritage conservation and tourism development.

The theoretical exploration of World Heritage protection started from Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention (Operational Guidelines). It states that cultural properties must meet the conditions of authenticity, and all properties nominated for inscription on the World Heritage List shall satisfy the conditions of integrity [ 1 ]. But some scholars believe that the two principles of authenticity and integrity should not be separated and both natural properties and cultural properties should meet these two principles [ 26 ]. Since the number of natural properties is much higher than that of cultural properties, related researches on two principles are mostly focused on cultural properties, while little on natural properties. As an important tool for conservation of properties and then enhance their integrity, as well as create linkages between properties and the wider area that surrounds them [ 27 ], buffer zones are also a vital theory to analysis the relationship between heritage protection and sustainable development [ 28 ].

With the advancement of researches, scholars have gradually realized that the value display and community development are important ways for the sustainable protection and management of world heritage [ 29 ]. Heritage corridor is the product of the joint development and interaction of American greenway movement, scenic road construction and regional heritage conservation concepts [ 30 ]. This theory takes into account the balance of linear heritage protection, community economic development and natural ecosystems. It is suitable for linear heritage such as the Silk Road, but not for nonlinear heritage. To explore the synergy theory of heritage protection and tourism applicable to a wider range, scholars have carried out research from different perspectives such as natural ecosystems, tourists, and community residents. Moreover, as one of the core theories of tourism geography, tourism man-land relationship theory focuses on the interaction between human tourism activities and geographical environment[ 31 ]. It is also an important guiding ideology for the study of sustainable development of natural heritage[ 32 ]. Wen [ 33 ] proposed to use ecological theory and experience economy theory to stimulate tourists’ cognition of heritage value, thereby promoting the coordinated development of protection and tourism in karst world natural heritage sites. In addition, the introduction of symbiosis theory [ 34 ], sustainable livelihood framework [ 35 ], life cycle assessment theory [ 36 ] and other theories have further enriched researches on world heritage conservation and sustainable tourism.

Based on the data sources, the main research methods used in researches on natural world heritage conservation and tourism can be divided into three categories: investigation research methods, indirect research methods, and experimental research methods. Among them, investigation research methods refer to methods that get data from questionnaires [ 37 ], interviews [ 38 ], field observations [ 39 ] and other similar ways; indirect research methods refer to methods that get data from websites [ 40 ], articles[ 41 , 42 ], yearbooks [ 43 ], institutions [ 44 ] and other similar ways; experimental research methods refer to methods that get data through computer experiments such as remote sensing (RS) and geographic information system (GIS) [ 45 ], or ground sample monitoring like sample plot [ 46 ] and online tracer test [ 18 ], or other similar methods. As the most commonly used method for related studies, the first two types of methods are mostly used in humanities research, such as stakeholder attitudes towards heritage conservation and tourism and their influencing factors. The third type of method is mostly used in natural research, such as the impact of heritage tourism on soil, vegetation, and water ecology in heritage sites. Table 1 shows some representative specific methods, data sources, core content and references of these methods.

The vast majority of relevant studies obtain data through questionnaires and interviews with stakeholders such as tourists and residents, as well as in-direct data from websites, reports, institutions and so on. Few scholars obtain data through monitoring experiments or geographic information technology in natural heritage sites. Long-term experimental monitoring research is even more blank. No studies have been found that combined experimental monitoring methods with questionnaire interviews or geographic information technology. This brings great difficulty to the collaborative research and management of natural heritage tourism and protection.

Investigation and research methods used in related researches include in-depth interviews and fieldwork, landscape sensitivity assessment, analytic hierarchy process (AHP), Delphi method, structural equation modelling (SEM), travel cost method, contingent valuation method, perception survey, open-ended interviews, principal component analysis (PCA), system dynamics model, what is not there (WINT) analysis and convergent parallel mixed method. The advantages of these methods are: (1) quantitative analysis of each element can enhance the persuasiveness of the analysis results; (2) it is helpful to find potential relationships between different variables through model analysis; (3) access to deep insights and emotional reflections. The disadvantages are: (1) bias in interpretation of results by investigators and respondents; (2) the acquired data is highly subjective, especially in questionnaires and interviews. These methods are suitable for researches on attitudes, willingness and choices of stakeholders, such as local community and visitors.

Indirect research methods used in related researches include SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis, carbon footprint, literature review and expert interview, AHP, fuzzy mathematical methods, official evaluations analysis, panel data analysis, propensity score matching, static model of tourism environment capacity, grounded theory, literature review and website analysis. The advantages of these methods are: (1) simple and easy to operate; (2) easy to obtain the required data; (3) low research cost. But the data of these methods often face problems of poor data correlation, poor timeliness and low reliability. These methods are suitable for theoretical analysis researches and researches with low requirements on data timeliness and resolution.

Experimental study methods used in related researches mainly include two categories: geographic information technology and experimental monitoring. Specifically, these methods contain remote sensing, GIS, global static partial equilibrium model, landscape pattern index, high-resolution online tracer test, and investigation method of sample plot. Geographic information technology can quickly obtain spatiotemporal data of large-scale study areas, which is suitable for monitoring and research of natural heritage sites. But it needs to be combined with ground monitoring survey data to increase the precision of its analysis results. The results obtained by the ground monitoring method are the most objective and accurate among all methods, but usually require higher professional knowledge of operators, and are time-consuming and costly.

Technologies

Compared with cultural World Heritage sites, natural properties are often more difficult to display and manage, with large area and complex natural and man-made influencing factors. The introduction of 3S technology (remote sensing, geography information systems, global positioning systems), 3D laser scanning technology, virtual reality (VR) technology, augmented reality (AR) technology, holographic projection technology, computer digital technology and other modern technical means is conductive to the digital construction, post-disaster landscape restoration and ecological restoration, and efficient manage of natural World Heritage sites.

Spatial information technology with 3S technology as the core has become the main technical means of current resource and environmental investigation and analysis [ 78 ]. The conservation and tourism researches on aesthetic value (criterion vii) and geological and landform value (criterion viii) conservation and tourism of natural World Heritage sites mostly use this technology. Zhou et al. [ 79 ] revealed the relationship between the tourism development process and the landscape pattern of the natural property based on multi-period remote sensing images. Xiao et al. [ 80 ] carried out an evaluation of the impact of tourism project construction on the aesthetic value of heritage landscapes based on GIS perspective analysis. Furthermore, remote sensing images are also widely used to measure and interpret the changes of the geological hazards area and the scale of disaster[ 81 ], as well as vegetation' reconstruction [ 82 , 83 ]. The use of 3S technology can effectively monitor the changes in the ecological environment, and is an important technical means for the conservation of natural properties. Researches using this method are relatively mature, but most of them focuses on the ecological change of a single property and the impacts analysis of infrastructure construction, urbanization and other human activities. There are few coupling studies on tourism and heritage ecological changes, and the horizontal comparative study between heritage sites is still blank.

3D laser scanning technology has the characteristics of fast scanning speed, strong initiative, high precision and low cost, which provides a new technical means for cave measurement [ 84 ]. Zhou et al. [ 85 ] discussed the morphological characteristics and control factors of Miao Chamber, which was included on the World Heritage Tentative List of China in 2019, based on terrestrial laser. Using 3D laser scanning technology to carry out cave measurement and imaging, mapping and analysis can effectively promote the popularization of the scientific value of cave heritage sites and the improvement of tourism quality.

Through technical means such as VR, AR and holographic projection technology, tourism products and tourism experiences can be extended to the field of virtual tourism [ 86 ], and the interactive experience of heritage tourism can be enhanced. In addition, the application of computer digitization technology has further promoted the efficient management of heritage tourism. Shilin Karst strengthens the informatization of geological heritage conservation and tourism management through the construction of smart platforms such as video surveillance, call center system, and GIS system [ 87 ]. Chen [ 88 ] built the tourism management system of the natural World Heritage site based on ASP.NET, WWW information service site technology, Browser/Server model, and SQL database system. Digital construction and smart tourism under the premise of protecting heritage value are the general trend of heritage tourism development and an effective management model.

Based on different research perspectives, scholars have proposed the ecological popular science tourism development model, the community participation tourism model, the ecological compensation model, the World Heritage-buffer zone-peripheral area coordinated protection model and other collaborative model of natural World Heritage conservation and tourism.

Wen [ 33 ] constructed an ecological popular science tourism development model based on the landscape spatial structure and morphological characteristics of the natural World Heritage site from the perspective of tourists. This model not only emphasizes the realization and acquisition of ecological popular science tourism, but also focuses on the management of various elements of the tourism, so as to facilitate its continuous development, rather than being limited to the existing ecological popular science tourism activities. But the specific implementation paths of this model still need further study.

Yang [ 89 ] proposed the natural heritage protection model of “feeding farmers through travel” from the perspective of the community. This type of model can effectively improve the income, conservation willingness, sense of belonging and education level of community residents, and is applicable to all World Heritage sites. However, in practice, this model often has problems such as lack of participation in decision-making, economic benefit distribution that is out of sync with the economic development of heritage sites, and the lack of effective guarantees for economic participation [ 90 ].

To solve these problems, Duan and Li [ 73 ] proposed to use the ecological compensation model to coordinate the protection of heritage values and the protection of indigenous interests. Their research method is to use the global static partial equilibrium model of Costanza et al. [ 91 ] to obtain landscape change information by interpreting remote sensing images, and to assess the ecological assets and depletion of natural ecosystems. On this basis, Fu [ 92 ] proposed a multi-ecological compensation mechanism for karst natural heritage sites by combining interviews with community residents and questionnaires on tourists, taking into account the interests of all stakeholders.

The conservation of World Heritage is inextricably linked to its buffer zone and wider peripheral areas, especially in karst-type natural World Heritage Sites. Due to the special above-ground-underground dual structure and complex hydrological system of the karst areas, the coordination and protection of the buffer zone and its surrounding areas is crucial to the sustainable development of the karst sites. Xiong et al. [ 93 ] constructed the World Heritage-buffer zone-peripheral area coordinated protection model (Table 2 ). This model organically combines World Heritage conservation, the prevention and control of rocky desertification with the development of surrounding communities, and promotes the sustainable development of natural World Heritage sites in karst areas.

Future research directions

Systematically explore the conservation methods and theories based on world heritage criteria.

Aiming at the problem of fragmented analysis and problem-oriented research in the studies of World Heritage conservation, it is an urgent need to systematically explore heritage conservation methods and theories based on World Heritage criteria. The World Heritage Budapest Declaration adopted by the World Heritage Committee in 2002 pointed out that an appropriate and reasonable balance should be sought between heritage conservation, sustainability and development [ 94 ]. Scholars’ understanding of World Heritage conservation and tourism has gone through three stages: conflict theory, reconciliation theory and synergy theory [ 95 ]. However, due to the huge disparity in the number of cultural heritage sites and natural heritage sites, scholars’ research on heritage conservation mostly focuses on cultural heritage, and less on natural heritage. Most of the related studies are fragmented analysis or problem-oriented research, or regard natural properties just as a special study area like other protected areas, with little characteristics of the World Heritage. The systematic theories and methods for heritage conservation has not yet formed. With the increasing number of world heritage sites and the trend of human and natural life community, researches on the theories and methods based on World Heritage criteria and classified conservation of heritage values are imminent.

Formulate corresponding conservation systems and ecological restoration standards for different types of properties

Aiming at the problem of unclear objects of heritage protection and restoration degree of World Heritage, the protection systems and ecological restoration standards of different World Heritage types need to be discussed. Since the birth of World Heritage Convention in 1972, World Heritage has a history of fifty years. However, what exactly are the World Heritage site to protect, how to protect them, and to what extent to restore the damage that has occurred, how to restore? These problems still plague scholars and heritage managers in actual researches and conservation management practices. UNESCO World Heritage Center and scholars agree that the core element of World Heritage is OUV, which includes three aspects: satisfying World Heritage criteria, authenticity/integrity, and protection and management. We must protect the carrier that embodies the OUV of World Heritage sites. But what elements are contained in each World Heritage criterion or the OUV carrier of each type of World Heritage has become a broad issue that has not been discussed. Scholars tend to study the protection of things that can be seen and felt in the short term, such as water quality, vegetation coverage and vegetation types, species diversity, protection of buildings and rock paintings, post-earthquake recovery, cave microorganisms and so on. Little attention has been paid to things whose changes can only be perceived over a long period of geological history, such as the preservation of landform values. In addition, the extent to which OUV should be protected and restored after being destroyed are also unclear, which hinders the researches on heritage conservation and the effectiveness of practice in solving practical problems.

Give full play to the complementary advantages of various research methods and reveal the mutual feedback mechanism between tourism and heritage conservation

The main research methods used in related researches are investigation research methods, indirect research methods, and experimental study methods. Related researches mostly use the first two types of methods. The vast majority of relevant studies obtain data through questionnaires and interviews with stakeholders such as tourists and residents. However, natural World Heritage sites are protected areas dominated by natural ecosystems, and the importance of experimental study methods, such as experimental monitoring and geographic information technology, in the mutual feedback research on heritage value conservation and tourism cannot be ignored. While these methods are rarely used in current research. Long-term series of experimental monitoring studies or studies that combine these types of methods are even more blank. Each kind of method has its own advantages and disadvantages. In future researches, the three kinds of methods should be combined, together with the heritage database constructed by long-term experimental monitoring, to deeply analyze the mutual feedback mechanism between heritage conservation and tourism.

Develop ecological restoration technology based on biodiversity restoration

In response to the problem of land degradation around the natural properties, ecological corridors need to be built through species diversity restoration to expand the benign outward influence of heritage ecology. There are many land degradation phenomena around natural World Heritage sites. On the one hand, due to the requirements for protection and management attributes when applying for the title of World Heritage, areas with better natural environment are often included in the scope of World Heritage when the boundary is delimited. While the buffer zone and its surrounding ecological environment are poor or disturbed by human activities. On the other hand, due to the requirements of the World Heritage Convention on the protection and management, environmental protection in World Heritage sites is generally given great attention, while the ecological environment of the buffer zone is often neglected, weakening the buffering effect of the buffer zones. Unreasonable tourism activities, infrastructure construction and urbanization in the buffer zones have accelerated the pace of land degradation. Vegetation is the most basic part of a terrestrial ecosystem, and all other organisms depend on it [ 96 ]. Species diversity is the manifestation of biodiversity at the species level, which can represent the structural complexity of biological communities, and reflects the structure type, organization level, development stage, degree of stability and habitat level of the community [ 97 , 98 ]. It is one of the key contents for future research to develop a series of ecological restoration technologies based on biodiversity restoration. It can be realized by building the radial ecological corridor connecting the World Heritage sites, buffer zones and their periphery, and driving the restoration of species diversity through vegetation restoration, so as to expand the benign ecological environment of the properties to wider periphery.

Build ecological compensation development models based on the perspective of heritage tourism and value realization of world heritage

Most of the World Heritage sites are important tourist attractions due to their high-grade tourism resources and outstanding scientific value. However, how to achieve these outstanding values has not yet been answered. In addition, stakeholders have different impacts on the ecological environment due to different ways of participating in tourism. Different travel models and behaviors of tourists, and different ways of providing tourism-related services (such as homestays, picking, hiking, rafting) will have different contribution values to the ecological degradation of tourist destinations. Ecological compensation can enhance the conservation awareness and protection behavior of tourism stakeholders, thereby promoting ecological protection and ecological restoration. As one of the effective ways to balance social benefits, economic benefits and environmental benefits, it has been widely valued by scholars and managers since it was proposed [ 99 ]. In the past, scholars have studied the ecological compensation mechanism, impact factors, and compensation methods of forest resources, wetland resources, grassland resources and so on. Some scholars paid attention to ecological compensation from the perspective of community residents and farmers' livelihoods. However, few attentions have been paid to targeted ecological compensation studies in natural World Heritage sites [ 100 , 101 ]. Thus, aiming at the problem of ecological degradation caused by the unbalanced distribution of benefits from tourism and unclear paths to realize the heritage values, researches on ecological compensation mechanism based on tourism perspective and value realization path of World Heritage are needed.

Conclusions

This literature review summarized the research progress of natural world heritage conservation and tourism from the perspectives of theory, method, technology and model, and proposed future research directions.

Our findings indicate that the UNESCO World Heritage Center and IUCN are the main force of the theory research, and put forward important theories such as authenticity, integrity, buffer zone, and sustainable tourism of heritage sites. Scholars have also introduced heritage corridor theory, ecological theory, experience economy theory, actor network theory, symmetry theory, sustainable livelihood framework, life cycle assessment theory, carbon footprint and so on into related researches from the perspective of social science. In future researches, we should pay more attention to the particularity of world heritage, and focus on theoretical and methodological research based on different world heritage value standards.

We also found that the vast majority of current research uses social science research methods, especially questionnaires and in-depth interviews. In addition, mathematical modeling methods are also common methods in related research. Only a few scholars use experimental monitoring or geographic information technology methods to carry out research from the perspective of natural science. No studies have been found that combine these types of methods. In future research, attention should be paid to the combination of long-term experimental monitoring data of natural heritage sites with social science and geographic information technology to build a natural heritage monitoring database to promote in-depth research and scientific management of natural heritage.

In terms of technology, scholars have used modern technical means including 3S technology, 3D laser scanning technology, virtual reality technology, augmented reality technology, holographic projection technology, and computer digital technology to promote the digital construction, smart tourism and post-disaster landscape restoration and ecological restoration in heritage sites. In future researches, ecological restoration technologies based on biodiversity restoration should also be paid attention to. And radial ecological corridors should be constructed to connect properties, buffer zones and their periphery, so as to expand the benign ecological environment of the natural properties to the buffer zones and wider peripheral areas.

Regarding the coordinated model of natural world heritage conservation and tourism, scholars have proposed models such as ecological popular science tourism development, community participation in heritage tourism, ecological compensation, and coordinated protection of property, buffer zone and peripheral areas. The core starting points are stakeholders' participation in heritage tourism, distribution of heritage tourism income and heritage zoning.

Furthermore, we put forward the following research prospects: (1) systematically explore the conservation methods and theories based on world heritage criteria; (2) formulate corresponding conservation systems and ecological restoration standards for different types of world heritage; (3) give full play to the complementary advantages of various research methods and reveal the mutual feedback mechanism between tourism and heritage conservation; (4) develop ecological restoration technology based on biodiversity restoration, establish radial ecological corridor, and expand the benign ecological environment of the properties to wider periphery; (5) build ecological compensation development models based on the perspective of heritage tourism and value realization of world heritage.

However, this study still has some limitations. Firstly, the research theme of world natural heritage protection and tourism involves the interdisciplinary integration of ecology, environmental science, tourism and other disciplines. Although we used some synonyms to cover more publications in this field, the retrieval results may still be incomplete due to the complexity and limitations of literature database and search methods. The search results of related articles in this study are subject to uncertainty but have little influence on the exploration of research progress and future research directions of natural World Heritage conservation and tourism in terms of the overall direction of research development. Monographs, newspapers, patents, technical reports and other types of literature, as well as articles in other literature databases may further clarify our findings. Finally, there is a certain degree of subjectivity in articles inclusion and subject analysis.

Availability of data and materials

The data presented in this study are openly available in [China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI)] at [ https://www.cnki.net/ ] and Web of Science (WOS) at [ https://www.webofscience.com ].

Abbreviations

Web of Science

China National Knowledge Infrastructure

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

Outstanding Universal Value

International Union for Conservation of Nature

Science Citation Index Expanded

Social Sciences Citation Index

Emerging Sources Citation Index

Science Citation Index

The Engineering Index

Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index

Chinese Science Citation Database

Remote Sensing

Geographic Information System

Analytic hierarchy process

Structural equation modelling

Principal component analysis

What is not there

Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats

China Entrepreneur Investment Club

National aeronautics and space administration

Remote sensing, geography information systems, global positioning systems

Three Dimensions

Virtual reality

Augmented reality

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of Guizhou normal university. We would also like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful and productive comments on the manuscript.

This research was funded by the Philosophy and Social Science Planning Key Project of Guizhou Province (Grant No. 21GZZB43), the Key Project of Science and Technology Program of Guizhou Province (Grant No. 5411 2017 Qiankehe Pingtai Rencai) and the China Overseas Expertise Introduction Program for Discipline Innovation (Grant No. D17016).

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Zhenzhen Zhang, Kangning Xiong & Denghong Huang

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All authors are contributed to the manuscript. Conceptualization, ZZ and XK; methodology, ZZ; validation, ZZ; formal analysis, ZZ; data curation, ZZ; writing—original draft preparation, ZZ; writing—review and editing, ZZ, XK and HD; visualization, ZZ and HD; project administration, XK; funding acquisition, XK. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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Zhang, Z., Xiong, K. & Huang, D. Natural world heritage conservation and tourism: a review. Herit Sci 11 , 55 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40494-023-00896-6

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The Oxford Handbook of Tourism History

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Heritage Tourism

The late Alan Gordon was professor of history at the University of Guelph. He authored three books: Making Public Pasts: The Contested Terrain of Montreal’s Public Memories, 1891–1930, The Hero and the Historians: Historiography and the Uses of Jacques Cartier and Time Travel: Tourism and the Rise of the Living History Museum in Mid-Twentieth Century Canada.

  • Published: 18 August 2022
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Heritage tourism is a form of cultural tourism in which people travel to experience places, artifacts, or activities that are believed to be authentic representations of people and stories from the past. It couples heritage, a way of imagining the past in terms that suit the values of the present, with travel to locations associated with enshrined heritage values. Heritage tourism sites are normally divided into two often overlapping categories: natural sites and sites related to human culture and history. By exploring the construction of heritage tourism destinations in historical context, we can better understand how and through what attributes places become designated as sites of heritage and what it means to have an authentic heritage experience. These questions are explored through heritage landscapes, national parks, battlefield tourism, architectural tourism, and the concept of world heritage.

Heritage is one of the most difficult, complex, and expansive words in the English language because there is no simple or unanimously accepted understanding of what heritage encompasses. 1 We can pair heritage with a vast range of adjectives, such as cultural, historical, physical, architectural, or natural. What unites these different uses of the term is their reference to the past, in some way or another, while linking it to present-day needs. Heritage, then, is a reimagining of the past in terms that suit the values of the present. It cannot exist independently of human attempts to make the past usable because it is the product of human interpretation of not only the past, but of who belongs to particular historical narratives. At its base, heritage is about identity, and the inclusion and exclusion of peoples, stories, places, and activities in those identities. The use of the word “heritage” in this context is a postwar phenomenon. Heritage and heritage tourism, although not described in these terms, has a history as long as the history of modern tourism. Indeed, a present-minded use of the past is as old as civilization itself, and naturally embedded itself in the development of modern tourism. 2 The exploration of that history, examining the origins and development of heritage tourism, helps unpack some of the controversies and dissonance it produces.

Heritage in Tourism

Heritage tourism sites are normally divided into two categories: natural sites and sites of human, historical, or cultural heritage. the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) separates its list of world heritage sites in this manner. Sites of natural heritage are understood to be places where natural phenomena such as wildlife, flora, geological features, or ecosystems, are generally deemed to be of exceptional beauty or significance. Cultural heritage sites, which represent over three quarters of UNESCO-recognized sites, are places where human activity has left a lasting and substantial physical impact that reveals important features of a culture or cultures. Despite the apparent simplicity of this division, it is not always easy to categorize individual sites. UNESCO thus allows for a category of “mixed” heritage sites. But official recognition is not necessary to mark a place as a heritage destination and, moreover, some authors point to versions of heritage tourism that are not tightly place-specific, such as festivals of traditional performances or foodways. 3

The central questions at the heart of heritage tourism ask what it is that designates something as “heritage” and whether tourists have an “authentic” heritage experience there. At its simplest, heritage tourism is a form of cultural tourism in which people travel to experience places, artifacts, or activities that are authentic representations of people and stories from the past. Yet this definition encompasses two, often competing, motivations. Heritage tourism is both a cultural phenomenon through which people attempt to connect with the past, their ancestors, and their identity, and it is an industry designed to profit from it. Another question surrounds the source of the “heritage” in heritage tourism. Many scholars have argued that heritage does not live in the destinations or attractions people seek. Heritage is not innate to the destination, but is rather based on the tourist’s motivations and expectations. Thus, heritage tourism is a form of tourism in which the main motivation for visiting a site is based on the traveler’s perceptions of its heritage characteristics. Following the logic of this view, the authenticity of the heritage experience depends on the traveler rather than the destination or the activity. Heritage features, as well as the sense of authenticity they impart, are democratized in what might be called a consumer-based model of authenticity. 4 This is a model that allows for virtually anything or any place to be a heritage destination. Although such an approach to understanding heritage tourism may well serve present-day studies, measuring motivations is more complicated for historical subjects. Long-departed travelers are not readily surveyed about their expectations; motivations have to be teased out of historical records. In a contrasting view, John Tunbridge and Gregory Ashworth argue that heritage attractions are created through marketing: they are invented to be heritage attractions and sold to a traveling public as such. Yet, heritage attractions, in this understanding, are still deemed authentic when they satisfy consumer expectations about heritage. 5 This insight also implies that heritage tourism destinations might be deceptions, and certainly there are examples of the fabrication of heritage sites. However, if motivations and expectations are arbiters of heritage, then even invented heritage can become authentic through its acceptance by a public. While not ignoring the motivations and expectations of travelers, for historians, any understanding of heritage tourism must include the process by which sites become designated as a places of heritage. It must encompass the economic aspects of tourism development, tourism’s role in constructing narratives of national or group identity, and the cultural phenomenon of seeking authentic representations of those identities, regardless of their origins. Such a practice might include traveling to sites connected to diasporas, places of historical significance, sites of religious pilgrimages, and landscapes of scenic beauty or cultural importance.

Scholarly interest in heritage, at least in the English-speaking world, dates from the 1980s reaction to the emergence of new right-wing political movements that used the past as a tool to legitimize political positions. Authors such as David Lowenthal, Robert Hewison, and Patrick Wright bemoaned the recourse to “heritage” as evidence of a failing society that was backward-looking, fearful, and resentful of modern diversity. 6 Heritage, they proclaimed, was elitist and innately conservative, imposed on the people from above in ways that distanced them from an authentic historical consciousness. Although Raphael Samuel fired back that the critique of heritage was itself elitist and almost snobbish, this line continued in the 1990s. Works by John Gillis, Tony Bennett, and Eric Hobsbawm, among others, concurred that heritage was little more than simplified history used as a weapon of social and political control.

At about the same time, historians also began to take tourism seriously as a subject of inquiry, and they quickly connected leisure travel to perceived evils in the heritage industry. Historians such as John K. Walton in the United Kingdom and John Jakle in the United States began investigating patterns of tourism’s history in their respective countries. Although not explicitly concerned with heritage tourism, works such as Jakle’s The Tourist explored the infrastructure and experience of leisure travel in America, including the different types of attractions people sought. 7 In Sacred Places , John Sears argued that tourism helped define America in the nineteenth century through its landscape and natural wonders. Natural tourist attractions, such as Yosemite and Yellowstone parks became sacred places for a young nation without unifying religious and national shrines. 8 Among North America’s first heritage destinations was Niagara Falls, which drew Americans, Europeans, Britons, and Canadians to marvel at its beauty and power. Tourist services quickly developed there to accommodate travelers and, as Patricia Jasen and others note, Niagara became a North American heritage destination at the birth of the continent’s tourism trade. 9

As the European and North American travel business set about establishing scenic landscapes as sites worthy of the expense and difficulty of travel to them, they rarely used a rhetoric of heritage. Sites were depicted as places to embrace “the sublime,” a feeling arising when the emotional experience overwhelms the power of reason to articulate it. Yet as modern tourism developed, promoters required more varied attractions to induce travelers to visit specific destinations. North America’s first tourist circuits, well established by the 1820s, took travelers up the Hudson River valley from New York to the spas of Saratoga Springs, then utilizing the Erie Canal even before its completion, west to Niagara Falls. Tourist guidebooks were replete with vivid depictions of the natural wonders to be witnessed, and very quickly Niagara became heavily commercialized. As America expanded beyond the Midwest in the second half of the nineteenth century, text and image combined to produce a sense that these beautiful landscapes were a common inheritance of the (white and middle-class) American people. Commissioned expeditions, such as the Powell Expedition of 1869–1872, produced best-selling travel narratives revealing the American landscape to enthralled readers in the eastern cities (see Butler , this volume). John Wesley Powell’s description of his voyage along the Colorado River combined over 450 pages of written description with 80 prints, mostly portraying spectacular natural features. American westward exploration, then, construed the continent’s natural wonders as its heritage.

In America, heritage landscapes often obscured human activity and imagined the continent as nature untouched. But natural heritage also played a role in early heritage tourism in Britain and Europe. Many scholars have investigated the connection between national character and the depiction of topographical features, arguing that people often implant their communities with ideas of landscape and associate geographical features with their identities. In this way, landscape helps embed a connection between places and particular local and ethnic identities. 10 Idealized landscapes become markers of national identity (see Noack , this volume). For instance, in the Romantic era, the English Lake District and the mountains of the Scottish Highlands became iconic national representations of English, Scottish, or British nationalities. David Lowenthal has commented on the nostalgia inherent in “landscape-as-heritage.” The archetypical English landscape, a patchwork of fields divided by hedgerows and sprinkled with villages, was a relatively recent construction when the pre-Raphaelite painters reconfigured it as the romantic allure of a medieval England. It spoke to the stability and order inherent in English character. 11

Travel literature combined with landscape art to develop heritage landscapes and promote them as tourist attractions. Following the 1707 Act of Union, English tourists became fascinated with Scotland, and in particular the Scottish Highlands. Tourist guidebooks portrayed the Highlands as a harsh, bleak environment spectacular for its beauty as well as the quaintness of its people and their customs (see Schaff , this volume). Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tourist texts cemented the image of Highland culture and heritage. Scholars have criticized this process as a “Tartanization” or “Balmoralization” of the country by which its landscape and culture was reduced to a few stereotypes appealing to foreign visitors. Nevertheless, guidebook texts described the bens, lochs, and glens with detail, helping create and reinforce a mental picture of a quintessential Highland landscape. 12 The massacre of members of the Clan MacDonald at Glencoe, killed on a winter night in 1692 for insufficient loyalty to the monarchy, added romance. Forgotten for over a century, the event was recalled in the mid-nineteenth century by the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, and quickly became a tragic tale associated with the scenic valley. At the same time the Highlands were being re-coded from a dangerous to a sublime landscape, its inhabitants became romanticized as an untainted, simple, premodern culture. The natural beauty of the landscape at Glencoe and its relative ease of access, being close to Loch Lomond and Glasgow, made it an attraction with a ready-made tragic tale. Highlands travel guides began to include Glencoe in their itineraries, combining a site of natural beauty with a haunting human past. Both natural and cultural heritage, then, are not inherent, but represent choices made by people about what and how to value the land and the past. On France’s Celtic fringe, a similar process unfolded. When modern tourism developed in Brittany in the mid-nineteenth century, guidebooks such as Joanne’s defined the terms of an authentic Breton experience. Joanne’s 1867 guide coupled the region’s characteristic rugged coastlines with the supposedly backward people, their costumes, habitudes, beliefs, and superstitions, who inhabited it. 13 Travel guides were thus the first contributors in the construction of heritage destinations. They began to highlight the history, real and imagined, of destinations to promote their distinctions. And, with increasing interest in the sites of national heritage, people organized to catalog, preserve, and promote heritage destinations.

Organizing Heritage Tourism

Among the world’s first bodies dedicated to preserving heritage was the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), organized in England in 1877. Emerging as a result of particular debates about architectural practices, this society opposed a then-popular trend of altering buildings to produce imaginary historical forms. This approach, which was most famously connected to Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc’s French restorations, involved removing or replacing existing architectural features, something renounced by the SPAB. The society’s manifesto declared that old structures should be repaired so that their entire history would be protected as part of cultural heritage. The first heritage preservation legislation, England’s Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1882, provided for the protection initially of 68 prehistoric sites and appointed an inspector of ancient monuments. 14 By 1895, movements to conserve historic structures and landscapes had combined with the founding of the National Trust, officially known as the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty, as a charitable agency. Much of the Trust’s early effort protected landscapes: of twenty-nine properties listed in 1907, seventeen were acreages of land and other open spaces. 15 Over the twentieth century, however, the Trust grew more and more concerned with protecting country houses and gardens, which now constitute the majority of its listed properties.

British efforts were duplicated in Europe. The Dutch Society for the Preservation of Natural Landmarks was established in 1904; France passed legislation to protect natural monuments in 1906. And in Sweden, the Society for the Protection of Nature was established in 1909, to name only a few examples. Nature was often connected to the spirit of “the folk,” an idea that encompassed a notion of an original ethnic core to the nation. Various European nationalisms of the period embraced the idea of an “authentic” national folk, with each folk considered unique due to its connection with a specific geography. Folklore and the celebration of folk culture offered Europeans links to imagined national heritages in a rapidly modernizing world, as modern, middle-class Europeans turned their attention to the romanticized primitive life of so-called simple peasants and linked notions of natural and human heritage. Through the concept of the folk, natural and human heritage combined to buttress emerging expressions of nationalism. 16

Sweden provides an instructive example. As early as the seventeenth century, Swedish antiquarians were intrigued by medieval rune stones, burial mounds, and cairns strewn across the country, but also saw these connected to natural features. Investigations of these relics of past Nordic culture involved a sense of the landscape in which they were found. This interest accelerated as folk studies grew in popularity, in part connected to nationalist political ambitions of Swedes during the growing tensions within the Kingdom of Sweden and Norway, which divided in 1905. Sweden’s preservation law required research into the country’s natural resources to create an inventory of places. Of particular interest were features considered to be “nature in its original state.” The intent was to preserve for future generations at least one example of Sweden’s primordial landscape features: primeval forests, swamps, peat bogs, and boulders. But interest was also drawn to natural landmarks associated with historical or mythical events from Sweden’s past. Stones or trees related to tales from the Nordic sagas, for example, combined natural with cultural heritage. 17

Although early efforts to protect heritage sites were not intended to support tourism, the industry quickly benefited. Alongside expanding tours to the Scottish Highlands and English Lake District, European landscapes became associated with leisure travel. As Tait Kellar argues for one example, the context of the landscape is crucial in understanding the role of tourism in the German Alps. 18 Guidebooks of the nineteenth and early twentieth century did not use the term “heritage,” but they described its tenets to audiences employing a different vocabulary. Baedeker’s travel guides, such as The Eastern Alps , guided bourgeois travelers through the hiking trails and vistas of the mountains and foothills, offering enticing descriptions of the pleasures to be found in the German landscape. Beyond the land, The Eastern Alps directed visitors to excursions that revealed features of natural history, human history, and local German cultures. 19

Across the Atlantic people also cherished escapes to the countryside for leisure and recreation and, as economic and population growth increasingly seemed to threaten the idyllic tranquility of scenic places, many banded together to advocate for their conservation. Yet, ironically, by putting in place systems to mark and preserve America’s natural heritage, conservationists popularized protected sites as tourist destinations. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the conservation movement encouraged the US government to set aside massive areas of American land as parks. For example, Europeans first encountered the scenic beauty of California’s Yosemite Valley at midcentury. With increasing settler populations following the California Gold Rush, tourists began arriving in ever larger numbers and promoters began building accommodations and roads to encourage them. Even during the Civil War, the US government recognized the potential for commercial overdevelopment and the desire of many to preserve America’s most scenic places. 20 In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant, designating acres of the valley protected wilderness. This set a precedent for the later creation of America’s first national park. In 1871, the Hayden Geological Survey recommended the preservation of nearly 3,500 square miles of land in the Rocky Mountains, in the territories of Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. Ferdinand V. Hayden was concerned that the pristine mountain region might soon be as overrun with tourists as Niagara Falls had by then become. 21 The following year, Congress established Yellowstone National Park, the world’s first designated “heritage” site. Yet, from the beginning, Yellowstone and subsequent parks were assumed to be tourist attractions. By 1879, tourists to Yellowstone had established over 200 miles of trails that led them to the park’s most famous attractions. Although thought of as nature preserves, parks were often furnished with railway access, and amenities and accommodations appeared, often prior to official designation. National parks were immediately popular tourist attractions. Even before it had established a centralized bureaucracy to care for them, the United States government had established nine national parks and nearly two dozen national monuments. Canada lagged, but established Rocky Mountain National Park (now Banff) in 1885 to balance interests of resource extraction and conservation. (The world’s second national park was Australia’s Royal National Park, established by the colony of New South Wales in 1879.) By the outbreak of the Great War, Canada and the United States had established fifteen national parks, all but one west of the Mississippi River.

Establishing parks was one component of building a heritage tourism infrastructure. Another was the creation of a national bureaucracy to organize it. The Canadian example reveals how heritage and tourism drove the creation of a national parks service. Much of the mythology surrounding Canada’s national parks emphasized the role of nature preservationists, yet the founder of the parks system, J. B. Harkin, was deeply interested in building a parks network for tourists. 22 Indeed, from early in the twentieth century, Canada’s parks system operated on the principle that parks should be “playgrounds, vacation destinations, and roadside attractions that might simultaneously preserve the fading scenic beauty and wildlife populations” of a modernizing nation. 23 Although Canada had established four national parks in the Rocky Mountains in the 1880s, the administration of those parks was haphazard and decentralized. It was not until the approaching third centennial of the founding of Quebec City (now a UNESCO World Heritage Site) that the Canadian government began thinking actively about administering its national heritage. In 1908, Canada hosted an international tourist festival on the Plains of Abraham, the celebrated open land where French and British armies had fought the decisive battle for supremacy in North America in 1759. The event so popularized the fabled battlefield that the government was compelled to create a National Battlefield Commission to safeguard it. This inspired the creation of the Dominion Parks Branch three years later to manage Canada’s natural heritage parks, the world’s first national parks service. By 1919 the system expanded to include human history—or at least European settler history—through the creation of national historic parks. These parks were even more explicitly designed to attract tourists, automobile tourists in particular. In 1916, five years after Canada, the United States established the National Parks Service with similar objectives.

As in Europe, nationalism played a significant role in developing heritage tourism destinations in America. The first national parks were inspired by the series of American surveying expeditions intended to secure knowledge of the landscape for political control. Stephen Pyne connects the American “discovery” of the Grand Canyon, for example, to notions of manifest destiny following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) that ended the Mexican-American War and ceded over 500,000 square miles of what is today the western United States. Popularized by the report of John Wesley Powell (1875) , the canyon began attracting tourists in the 1880s, although Congress failed to establish it as a national park. 24 Tourism was central to developing the Grand Canyon as a national heritage destination. Originally seen by Spanish explorers as an obstacle, and as a sacred place by the Navajo, Hopi, Hualapai, and Havasupai peoples, the canyon came to mark American exceptionalism. Piece by piece, sections of the canyon were set aside as reserves and finally declared a national park in 1919. By then, the park had been serviced by a railway (since 1901) and offered tourists a luxury hotel on the canyon’s south rim.

Archaeology also entered into the construction of American heritage. Almost as soon as it was annexed to the United States, the American southwest revealed to American surveyors a host of archaeological remains. For residents of the southwest, the discovery of these ancient ruins of unknown age pointed to the nobility of a lost predecessor civilization. By deliberately construing the ruins as being of an unknown age, Anglo-American settlers were able to draw distinctions between the ancients and contemporary Native Americans in ways that validated their own occupation of the territory. The ruins also had commercial potential. In Colorado, President Theodore Roosevelt established Mesa Verde National Park in 1906 to protect and capitalize on the abandoned cliff dwellings located there. These ruins had been rediscovered in the 1880s when ranchers learned of them from the local Ute people. By the turn of the century, the ruins had attracted so many treasure seekers that they needed protection. This was the first national park in America designated to protect a site of archaeological significance and linked natural and human heritage in the national parks system. 25

If, as many argue, heritage is not innate, how is it made? Part of the answer to this question can be found in the business of tourism. Commercial exploitation of heritage tourism emerged alongside heritage tourism, but was particularly active in the postwar years. Given their association with tourism, it is not surprising that railways and associated businesses played a prominent role in promoting heritage destinations. Before World War II, the most active heritage tourism promoter was likely the Fred Harvey Company, which successfully marketed, and to a great degree created, much of the heritage of the American southwest. The Fred Harvey Company originated with the opening of a pair of cafés along the Kansas Pacific Railway in 1876. After a stuttering beginning, Harvey’s chain of railway eateries grew in size. Before dining cars became regular features of passenger trains, meals on long-distance trips were provided by outside business such as Harvey’s at regular stops. With the backing of the Santa Fe Railroad, the company also developed attractions based on the Southwest region’s unique architectural and cultural features. The image capitalized on the artistic traditions of Native Americans and early Spanish traditions to create, in particular, the Adobe architectural style now associated with Santa Fe and New Mexico. 26 These designs were also incorporated into tourist facilities on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, including the El Tovar hotel and the Hopi House souvenir and concession complex, designed to resemble a Hopi pueblo.

Relying on existing and manufactured heritage sites, North American railways popularized attractions as heritage sites. The Northern Pacific Railroad financed a number of hotels in Yellowstone Park, including the Old Faithful Inn in 1904. In 1910, the Great Northern Railroad launched its “See America First” campaign to attract visitors (and new investments) to its routes to the west’s national parks. In Canada, the Dominion Atlantic Railway rebuilt Grand Pré, a Nova Scotia Acadian settlement to evoke the home of the likely fictional character Evangeline from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1848 poem by the same name. In the poem, Evangeline was deported from Acadia in 1755 and separated from her betrothed. By the 1920s, the railway was transporting tourists to Grand Pré, christened “Land of Evangeline,” where reproductions stood in for sites mentioned in the poem. 27 However, following World War I, heritage tourism in North America became increasingly dependent on automobile travel and the Dominion Atlantic eventually sold its interest to the Canadian government.

Conflict as Cultural Heritage

Tourism to sites of military history initially involved side trips from more popular, usually natural, attractions. Thomas Chambers notes that the sites of battles of the Seven Years’ War, Revolutionary War, and War of 1812 became tourist attractions as side trips from more established itineraries, such as the northern or fashionable tours. War of 1812 battlefields, many of them in the Niagara theater of the war, were conveniently close to the natural wonders people already came to see. By visiting the places where so many had sacrificed for their country, tourists began attaching new meaning to the sites. Ease of access was essential. Chambers contrasts sites in southern states with those in the north. In the south, the fields of important American Revolution victories at Cowpens and King’s Mountain were too remote to permit easy tourist access and long remained undeveloped. 28 In a contrary example, the Plains of Abraham, the scene of General Wolfe’s dramatic victory over France that led to the Conquest of Canada, was at first a curiosity. The visit to Quebec, a main destination on the northern tour, was originally based on its role as a major port and the attraction of the scenic beauty of the city on the cliffs, compared favorably to Cintra in Portugal. 29 Ease of access helped promoters convert an empty field near the city into the “hallowed Plains.”

Access to battlefields increased at almost the exact moment that one of the nineteenth century’s most devastating wars, the American Civil War, broke out. Railway travel was essential to both the success of the Union Army in reconquering the rebelling Confederacy, and in developing tourism to the sites of the slaughter. Railway travel made sites accessible for urban travelers and new technologies, such as photography and the telegraph, sped news of victories and defeats quickly around the nation. Gettysburg, the scene of a crucial Union victory in July 1863, became a tourist attraction only a few days later. Few would call the farmland of southeastern Pennsylvania sublime, but dramatic human history had unfolded there. The battle inspired the building of a national memorial on the site only four months later, the Soldiers’ National Cemetery. At the inauguration of the cemetery Abraham Lincoln delivered his “Gettysburg Address,” calling on the nation to long remember and cherish the “hallowed ground” where history had been made.

Gettysburg sparked a frenzy of marking sites of Civil War battles and events. Battle sites became important backdrops for political efforts at reunion and reconciliation after the war and attracted hundreds and later thousands of tourists for commemorative events and celebrations. Ten thousand saw President Rutherford Hayes speak at Gettysburg in 1878 and, for the 50th anniversary of Gettysburg, some 55,000 veterans returned to Pennsylvania in July 1913. What had once been a site of bloody, brutal combat had been transformed into a destination where tourists gathered to embrace their shared heritage, north and south. As the years progressed, more attractions were added as tourists began to see their heritage on the battlefield. 30

The conflict that most clearly created tourist attractions out of places of suffering was the World War I. Soon after the war ended, its sites of slaughter also became tourist attractions. As with the Civil War in America, World War I tourists were local people and relatives of the soldiers who had perished on the field of battle. By one estimate 60,000 tourists visited the battlefields of the Western Front by the summer of 1919, the same year that Michelin began publishing guidebooks to them. Numbers grew in the decades following the war. Over 140,000 tourists took in the sites of the war in 1931, which grew to 160,000 for 1939. Organizations such as the Workers’ Travel Association hoped that tourism to battle sites would promote peace, but the travel business also benefited. Travel agencies jumped at the chance to offer tours and publishers produced travel guides to the battlefields. At least thirty English guidebooks were published by 1921. 31

This interest in a conflict that killed, often in brutal fashion, so many might seem a ghoulish form of heritage tourism. Yet Peter Slade argues that people do not visit battlefields for the love for death and gore. They attend these sites out of a sense of pilgrimage to sites sacred to their national heritage. Organized pilgrimages reveal this sense of belonging most clearly. The American Legion organized a pilgrimage of 15,000 veterans in 1927 to commemorate the decade anniversary of America’s entry to the war. The following year 11,000 Britons, including 3,000 women, made a pilgrimage of their own. Canada’s first official pilgrimage involved 8,000 pilgrims (veterans and their families) to attend the inauguration of the Vimy Ridge Memorial, marking a site held by many as a place sacred to Canadian identity. Australians and New Zealanders marched to Gallipoli in Turkey for similar reasons. 32 As with the sites of the Western Front, Gallipoli and pilgrimages to it generated travel accounts and publishers assembled guidebooks to help travelers navigate its attractions and accommodations. In these episodes, tourism was used to construct national heritage. In the interwar years, tourist activity popularized the notion that sites of national heritage existed on the battlefields of foreign lands, where “our” nation’s history was forged. National heritage tourism, then, became transnational.

Since the end of World War II, battlefield tourism has become an important projection of heritage tourism. Commercial tour operators organize thousands of tours of European World War I and World War II battlefields for Americans and Canadians, as for other nationalities. The phenomenon seems particularly pronounced among North Americans. The motivation behind modern battlefield tourism reveals its connection to heritage tourism. If heritage is an appeal to the past that helps establish a sense of identity and belonging, the feelings of national pride and remorse for sacrifice of the fallen at these sites helps define them as sacred to a particular vision of a national past. The sanctity of the battle site makes the act of consuming it as a tourist attraction an act of communion with heritage.

Built Heritage and Tourism

During the upheaval of the Civil War, some Americans began to recognize historic houses as elements of their heritage worthy of preservation. These houses were initially not seen as tourist attractions, but as markers of national values. Their heritage value preceded their value as tourist attractions. The first major preservation initiative launched in 1853 to save George Washington’s tomb and home from spoliation. Behind overt sectional divisions of north and south was an implied vesting of republican purity among the patrician families that could trace their ancestors to the revolutionary age and who could restore American culture to its proper deferential state. The success of preserving Mount Vernon led to a proliferation of similar house museums. By the 1930s, the American museum association even produced a guide for how to establish new examples and promote them as sites of heritage for tourist interest. Historic houses provided tangible, physical evidence of heritage. Like scenic landscapes attached to the stories of history, buildings connected locations to significant events and people of the past. Architectural heritage came to be closely associated with tourism. Architectural monuments are easily identified, easy to promote, and, as physical structures, easily reproduced in souvenir ephemera. Although the recognition of architectural monuments as tourist draws could be said to have originated with the Grand Tour, or at least with the publication of John Ruskin’s “Seven Lamps of Architecture” (1849), which singled out the monuments of Venice for veneration, twentieth century mobility facilitated a greater desire to travel to see historic structures. Indeed, mobility, especially automobility, prompted the desire to preserve or even reinvent the structural heritage of the past.

A driving factor behind the growth of tourism to sites associated with these structural relics was a feeling that the past—and especially the social values of the past—was being lost. For example, Colonial Williamsburg developed in reaction to the pace of urban and social change brought about by automobile travel in the 1920s. Williamsburg was once a community of colonial era architecture, but had become just another highway town before John D. Rockefeller lent his considerable wealth to its preservation and reconstruction. 33 Rockefeller had already donated a million dollars for the restoration of French chateaux at Versailles, Fontainebleu, and Rheims. 34 At Williamsburg, his approach was to remove structures from the post-Colonial period to create a townscape from the late eighteenth century. By selecting a cut-off year of 1790, Rockefeller and his experts attempted to freeze Williamsburg in a particular vision of the past. The heritage envisioned was not that of ordinary Americans, but that of colonial elites. Conceived to be a tourist attraction, Colonial Williamsburg offered a tourist-friendly lesson in American heritage. Rockefeller, and a host of consultants convinced the (white) people of Williamsburg to reimagine their heritage and their past. America’s heritage values were translated to the concepts of self-government and individual liberty elaborated by the great patriots, Washington, Madison, Henry, and Jefferson. The town commemorated the planter elites that had dominated American society until the Jacksonian era, and presented them as progenitors of timeless ideals and values. They represented the “very cradle of that Americanism of which Rockefeller and the corporate elite were the inheritors and custodians.” 35

Rockefeller’s Williamsburg was not the only American heritage tourist reconstruction. Canada also underwent reconstruction projects for specifically heritage tourism purposes, such as the construction of “Champlain’s Habitation” at Port Royal, Nova Scotia or the attempt to draw tourists to Invermere, British Columbia with a replica fur trade fort. 36 Following World War I and accelerating after World War II, the number and nature of places deemed heritage attractions grew. Across North America, all levels of governments and private corporations built replica heritage sites with varying degrees of “authenticity.” Although these sites often made use of existing buildings and landscapes, they also manufactured an imaginary environment of the past. The motivation behind these sites was almost always diversification of the local economy through increased tourism. Canada’s Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site is perhaps the most obvious example. It is a reconstructed section of the French colonial town, conquered and destroyed in 1758, built on the archaeological remains of the original. Constructed by the government of Canada as a means to diversify the failing resource economy of its Atlantic provinces, the tourist attraction was also designated a component of Canada’s national heritage. The US government also increased its interest in the protection of heritage destinations, greatly expanding the list of national historic landmarks, sites, parks, and monuments. As postwar governments became more concerned with managing their economies, tourism quickly came to be seen as a key economic sector. The language of national heritage helped build public support for state intervention in natural and historic artifacts and sites that could be presented as sacred national places.

In Europe, many historic sites were devastated by bombardment during World War II. Aside from pressing humanitarian issues, heritage concerns also had to be addressed. In France, the war had destroyed nearly half a million buildings, principally in the northern cities, many of which were of clear heritage value. The French government established a commission to undertake the reconstruction of historic buildings and monuments and, in some cases, entire towns. Saint-Malo, in Brittany, had been completely destroyed, but the old walled town was rebuilt to its seventeenth century appearance. Already a seaside resort, the town added a heritage site destination. In the 1920s and 1930s, European fascist states had also employed heritage tourism. In Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany, workers’ leisure time was to be organized to prevent ordinary Italians and Germans from falling into unproductive leisure activities. Given the attachment to racialized views of purity and identity, organized tourism was encouraged to allow people to bond with their national heritage. Hiking in the Black Forest or the alpine Allgau might help connect Germans to the landscape and reconnect them to the traditional costumes and folkways of rural Germany. As Kristin Semmens argues, most studies of the Nazi misappropriation of the past ignore the displays of history aimed toward tourists at Germany’s heritage sites. Many museums and historic sites twisted their interpretations to fit the Nazi present. 37 In ways that foreshadowed the 1980s British left’s critique of heritage, fascist regimes made use of heritage tourism to control society. After the war, a vigorous program of denazification was undertaken to remove public relics of the Nazi regime and in formerly occupied territories, as was a program of reconstruction. In the communist east, blaming the Nazis for the destruction of German heritage was an ideological gift. It allowed the communist regime to establish itself as the true custodian of German identity and heritage. 38 In the capitalist west, tourism revived quickly. By early 1947, thirteen new tourist associations were active in the Allied occupation zone. Tourism rhetoric in the postwar years attempted to distance German heritage from the Nazi regime to reintroduce foreign travelers to the “real Germany.” Despite this objective, Alon Confino notes that traces of the Nazi past can be located in postwar tourist promotions that highlighted Nazi-era infrastructure. 39

Postwar Heritage Tourism

As tourism became a more global industry, thanks in no small part to the advent of affordable air travel in the postwar era, heritage tourism became transnational. Ethnic heritage tourism became more important, and diaspora or roots tourism, which brought second- and third-generation migrants back to the original home of their ancestors, accelerated. Commodifying ethnic heritage has been one of the most distinctive developments in twenty-first century tourism. Ethnic heritage tourism can involve migrants, their children, or grandchildren returning to their “home” countries as visitors. In this form of tourism, the “heritage” component is thus expressed in the motivations and self-identifications of the traveler. It involves a sense of belonging that is rooted in the symbolic meanings of collective memories, shared stories, and the sense of place embodied in the physical locations of the original homeland. Paul Basu has extensively studied the phenomenon of “roots tourism” among the descendants of Scottish Highlanders. He suggests that in their trips to Scotland to conduct genealogical research, explore sites connected to their ancestors, or sites connected to Scottish identity, they construct a sense of their heritage as expatriate Scots. 40 Similar “return” movements can be found in the migrant-descended communities of many settler colonial nations. For second-generation Chinese Americans visiting China, their search for authentic experiences mirrored those of other tourists. Yet, travel to their parents’ homeland strengthened their sense of family history and attachment to Chinese cultures. 41 On the other hand, Shaul Kellner examines the growing trend of cultivating roots tourism through state-sponsored homeland tours. In Tours that Bind , Kellner explores the State of Israel and American Jewish organizations’ efforts to forge a sense of Israeli heritage among young American Jews. However, Kellner cautions, individual experiences and human agency limit the hosts’ abilities to control the experience and thus control the sense of heritage. 42

Leisure tourism also played a role in developing heritage sites, as travelers to sunshine destinations began looking for more interesting side trips. Repeating the battlefield tourism of a century before, by the 1970s access to historic and prehistoric sites made it possible to add side trips to beach vacations. Perhaps the best example of this was the development of tourism to sites of Mayan heritage by the Mexican government in the 1970s. The most famous heritage sites, at least for Westerners, were the Mayan sites of Yucatan. First promoted as destinations by the American travel writer John Lloyd Stephens in the 1840s, their relative inaccessibility (as well as local political instabilities) made them unlikely tourist attractions before the twentieth century. By 1923, the Yucatan government had opened a highway to the site of the Chichén Itzá ruins, and local promoters began promotions in the 1940s. It was not until after the Mexican government nationalized all archaeological ruins in the 1970s that organized tours from Mexican beach resorts began to feature trips to the ruins themselves. 43

Mexico’s interest in the preservation and promotion of its archaeological relics coincided with one of the most important developments in heritage tourism in the postwar years: the emergence of the idea of world heritage. The idea was formalized in 1972 with the creation of UNESCO’s designation of World Heritage Sites. The number of sites has grown from the twelve first designated in 1978 to well over 1,000 in 167 different countries. In truth, the movement toward recognizing world heritage began with the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, which did not limit its activities to preserving only England’s architectural heritage. Out of its advocacy, European architects and preservationists drafted a series of accords, such as the Athens Charter of 1931, and the later Venice Charter of 1964, both of which emerged from a growing sense of cultural internationalism. These agreements set guidelines for the preservation and restoration of buildings and monuments. What UNESCO added was the criterion of Outstanding Universal Value for the designation of a place as world heritage. It took until 1980 to work out the first iteration of Outstanding Universal Value and the notion has never been universally accepted, although UNESCO member countries adhere to it officially. Once a site has been named to the list, member countries are expected to protect it from deterioration, although this does not always happen. As of 2018, 54 World Heritage Sites are considered endangered. This growth mirrored the massive expansion of tourism as a business and cultural phenomenon in the late twentieth century. As tourism became an increasingly important economic sector in de-colonizing states of Asia and Latin America, governments became more concerned with its promotion by seeking out World Heritage designation.

Ironically, World Heritage designation itself has been criticized as an endangerment of heritage sites. Designation increases the tourist appeal of delicate natural environments and historic places, which can lead to problems with maintenance. Designation also affects the lives of people living within the heritage destination. Luang Prabang, in Laos, is an interesting example. Designated in 1995 as one of the best-preserved traditional towns in Southeast Asia, it represents an architectural fusion of Lao temples and French colonial villas. UNESCO guidelines halted further development of the town, except as it served the tourist market. Within the designated heritage zone, buildings cannot be demolished or constructed, but those along the main street have been converted to guest houses, souvenir shops, and restaurants to accommodate the growing tourist economy. Critics claim this reorients the community in non-traditional ways, as locals move out of center in order to rent to foreign tourists. 44 While heritage tourism provided jobs and more stable incomes, it also encouraged urban sprawl and vehicle traffic as local inhabitants yielded their town to the influx of foreign, mostly Western, visitors.

Heritage tourism may hasten the pace of change by making destinations into attractions worth visiting. To accommodate the anticipated influx of global tourists, Luang Prabang airport was renovated and its runway extended to handle larger jets in between 2008 and 2013. The influx of tourists at Machu Picchu in Peru has repeatedly led the Peruvian government to attempt to control access to the site, yet dependent on tourism’s economic contribution, such restrictions are difficult. The temple at Borobudur in Indonesia undergoes near continuous maintenance work to repair the wear and tear caused by thousands of tourists walking its steps every day. Indeed, the preserved ruins are said to be under greater threat than when they were discovered in the early nineteenth century, overgrown by the jungle.

Another colonial aspect of world heritage designation stems from the narratives of the sites themselves. Many critics accuse UNESCO of a Eurocentric conception of Outstanding Universal Value and world heritage. 45 Cultural heritage destinations in non-Western countries are often associated with sites made famous by the projects of European imperialism. The fables of discovering ancient ruins, for instance, prioritize the romance of discovery. Many of the most famous non-Western sites were “discovered” by imperial agents in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Angkor Wat in Cambodia was introduced to the world by the French explorer Henri Muhot in 1860. Machu Picchu, the Mayan sites of Yucatan, and the ancestral Anasazi sites of the American southwest were excavated, in some cases purchased, and their narratives constructed by American and European adventurers. The cultural relics of these ancient places were looted and assembled in Western museums, the stories of adventure and discovery published for Western audiences, and eventually a travel infrastructure was established to bring mostly Western tourists to the destinations. Western tourism thus forms another kind of imperialism, as the heritage of a destination is determined to suit the expectations and motivations of the visitors. This tends to obscure other features of local history, leaving those features of heritage not suitable to the tourist trade less valuable.

Made or Experienced?

Heritage is both made and experienced. Critics of heritage tourism rightly point to the ways in which heritage promotions can manipulate the past to defend specific ideological or commercial values. Yet, at the same time, heritage experiences are honestly felt and fundamental in the shaping of modern national or cultural identities. Thus, the questions of what constitutes “heritage” in a tourist attraction and whether or not the experience is “authentic” are fundamentally connected and contradictory. Neither heritage nor authenticity can be separated from both the process of their construction and the motivations and expectations of visitors. This makes heritage tourism a slippery subject for study. It involves numerous contradictions and complications. Indeed, contradiction and dissonance are at the heart of any notion of heritage tourism; what might be heritage for some is merely leisure and consumption for others. The dissonance comes from this dichotomy: the consumer exploitation of a destination that is held by many to have sacred properties. Yet, as this chapter suggests, the construction of those sacred properties is at times dependent on the consumer culture of the tourism industry.

Further Reading

Ashworth, Gregory J. , and John E. Tunbridge . The Tourist-Historic City: Retrospect and Prospect of Managing the Heritage City . London: Routledge, 2001 .

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Basu, Paul.   Highland Homecomings: Genealogy and Heritage Tourism in the Scottish Diaspora . London: Routledge, 2006 .

Dearborn, Lynne M. , and John C. Stallmeyer . Inconvenient Heritage: Erasure and Global Tourism in Luang Prabang . Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2010 .

Hall, Melanie , ed. Towards World Heritage: International Origins of the Preservation Movement, 1880–1930 . Farnham: Ashgate, 2011 .

Hewison, Robert.   The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline . London: Methuen, 1987 .

Harrison, Rodney.   Heritage: Critical Approaches . New York: Routledge, 2013 .

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara.   Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998 .

Lowenthal, David.   The Past Is a Foreign Country: Revisited . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 .

Miles, Stephen.   The Western Front: Landscape, Tourism and Heritage . Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2017 .

Macdonald, Sharon.   Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today . London: Routledge, 2013 .

Park, Hyung Yu.   Heritage Tourism . London: Routledge, 2014 .

Shaffer, Marguerite S.   See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940 . Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001 .

Schama, Simon.   Landscape and Memory . New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1995 .

Sears, John F.   Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century . Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998 .

Timothy, Dallen J.   Cultural Heritage and Tourism: An Introduction . Bristol: Channel View, 2011 .

Winter, Tim.   Post-Conflict Heritage, Postcolonial Tourism: Culture, Politics and Development at Angkor . London: Routledge, 2007 .

1   Peter J. Larkham , “Heritage As Planned and conserved,” in Heritage, Tourism and Society , ed. David T. Herbert (London: Mansell, 1995), 85 ; Peter Johnson and Barry Thomas , “Heritage As Business,” in Heritage, Tourism and Society , ed. David T. Herbert (London: Mansell, 1995), 170 ; David Lowenthal , The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 94.

2   David C. Harvey , “The History of Heritage,” in Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity , eds. Brian Graham and Peter Howard (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 22.

3   Deepak Chhabra , Robert Healy , and Erin Sills , “Staged Authenticity and Heritage Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 30, no. 3 (2003): 702–719.

4   Tomaz Kolar and Vesna Zabkar , “A Consumer-Based Model of Authenticity: An Oxymoron or the Foundation of Cultural Heritage Marketing?” Tourism Management 31, no. 5 (2010): 652–664.

5   John Tunbridge and Gregory Ashworth , Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict (Chichester: J. Wiley, 1996), 10–13.

6 See Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History ; Robert Hewison , The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen London, 1987) ; Patrick Wright , On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985).

7   John A. Jakle , The Tourist: Travel in Twentieth-Century North America (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1985).

8   John F. Sears , Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).

9   Patricia Jasen , Wild Things: Nature, Culture, and Tourism in Ontario, 1790–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995).

10   Simon Schama , Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1995), 6–19 ; Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathan (eds.), Landscape, Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives (London and Sterling: Pluto, 2003), 2–3.

11   David Lowenthal , “European and English Landscapes as National Symbols,” in Geography and National Identity , ed. David Hoosen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 21–24 ; and David Lowenthal , “Landscape as Heritage,” in Heritage: Conservation, Interpretation and Enterprise , eds. J. D. Fladmark (London: Routledge, 1993), 10–11.

12   Katherine Grenier , Tourism and Identity in Scotland, 1770–1914: Creating Caledonia (London: Routledge, 2005), 5–11.

13   Patrick Young , Enacting Brittany: Tourism and Culture in Provincial France, 1871–1939 (Farnham; Burlington: Ashgate, 2012).

14   Christopher Chippindale , “The Making of the First Ancient Monuments Act, 1882, and Its Administration Under General Pitt-Rivers,” Journal of the British Archaeological Association 86 (1983): 1–55 ; Tim Murray , “The History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Archaeology: The Case of the Ancient Monuments Protection Act (1882),” in Histories of Archaeology: A Reader in the History of Archaeology , eds. Tim Murray and Christopher Evans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 145–176.

  National Trust Act, 1907 . 7 Edward 7, Ch cxxxvi, first schedule.

Other countries developed similar programs, especially after World War II: Australia, 1947; United States, 1949; Japan, 1964; and Italy, 1975.

17   Bosse Sundin , “Nature as Heritage: The Swedish Case,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 11, no. 1 (2005): 9–20.

18   Tait Keller , Apostles of the Alps: Mountaineering and Nation Building in Germany and Austria, 1860–1939 (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press Books, 2015).

19 See Karl Baedeker , The Eastern Alps, Including the Bavarian Highlands, The Tyrol, Salzkammergut, Styria, and Carinthia (Leipsic: K. Baedeker, 1879).

20   Eric Zuelow , A History of Modern Tourism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 108–109.

21   M. D. Merrill (ed.), Yellowstone and the Great West: Journals, Letters, and Images from the 1871 Hayden Expedition (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 210–211.

22   Alan Gordon , Making Public Pasts: The Contested Terrain of Montreal’s Public Memories (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001).

23   John Sandlos , “Nature’s Playgrounds: The Parks Branch and Tourism Promotion in the National Parks, 1911–1929,” in A Century of Parks Canada, 1911–2011 , ed. Claire Elizabeth Campbell (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2011).

24   Stephen Pyne , How the Canyon Became Grand (New York: Viking, 1998), 25–26, 55–60 ; J. W. Powell , The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons (New York: Dover Press, 1875).

25   Linda Rancourt , “Cultural Celebration,” National Parks 80, no. 1 (2006): 4.

26   Charles Wilson , The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1997).

27   Ian McKay and Robin Bates , In the Province of History: The Making of the Public Past in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 71–129.

28   Thomas A. Chambers , Memories of War Visiting Battlegrounds and Bonefields in the Early American Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2012).

29 See Alan Gordon, “Where Famous Heroes Fell: Tourism, History, and Liberalism in old Quebec,” 58–81 and J. I. Little , “In Search of the Plains of Abraham: British, American, and Canadian Views of a Symbolic Landscape, 1793–1913,” in Remembering 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Memory , eds. Phillip Buckner and John G. Reid (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 82–109.

30   John S. Patterson , “A Patriotic Landscape: Gettysburg, 1863–1913,” Prospects 7 (1982): 315–333.

31   David Lloyd , Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia and Canada, 1919–1939 (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1998), 100–111.

  Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism , 98–100.

33   George Humphrey Yetter , Williamsburg Before and After: The Rebirth of Virginia’s Colonial Capital (Colonial Williamsburg, 1988), 49–52 ; Stephen Conn , Museums and American intellectual life, 1876–1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 155.

34   Raymond B. Fosdick , John D. Rockefeller Jr.: A Portrait (New York: Harper, 1956), 356–357.

35   Michael Wallace , “Visiting the Past: History Museums in the United States,” in A Living History Reader , ed. Jay Anderson (Nashville: American Association of State and Local History, 1991), 190.

36   Alan Gordon , Time Travel: Tourism and the Rise of the Living History Museum in Mid-Twentieth-Century Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016), 65–70 ; Ben Bradley , “The David Thompson Memorial Fort: An Early Outpost of Historically Themed Tourism in Western Canada,” Histoire sociale/Social History 49, no. 99 (2016): 409–429.

37   Kristen Semmens , Seeing Hitler’s Germany: Tourism in the Third Reich (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

38   Gregory Ashworth and Peter Larkham , “A Heritage for Europe: The Need, the Task, the Contribution,” in Building a New Heritage , ed. Gregory Ashworth and Peter Larkham (London: Routledge, 1994), 127–129.

39   Alon Confino , “Traveling as a Culture of Remembrance: Traces of National Socialism in West Germany, 1945–1960,” History & Memory 12, no. 2 (2000): 92–121.

40 See, for example, Paul Basu , Highland Homecomings: Genealogy and Heritage Tourism in the Scottish Diaspora (London: Routledge, 2007).

41   Huang, Wei-Jue , Gregory Ramshaw , and William C. Norman . “Homecoming or Tourism? Diaspora Tourism Experience of Second-Generation Immigrants,” Tourism Geographies 18, no. 1 (2016): 59–79.

42   Shaul Kelner , Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage, and Israeli Birthright Tourism (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

43   Dina Berger , The Development of Mexico’s Tourism Industry: Pyramids by Day, Martinis by Night (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

44 See, for example, Dawn Starin , “Letter From Luang Prabang: World Heritage Designation, Blessing or Curse?” Critical Asian Studies 40, no. 4 (December 2008): 639–652.

45   Tim Winter , “Heritage Studies and the Privileging of Theory,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 20, no. 5 (2014): 556–572.

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  • How Culture and Heritage Tourism Boosts More Than A Visitor Economy

by Carolyn Childs 43 Comments

Culture and heritage tourism plays a critical role in building the visitor economy and goes even beyond that. A recent survey showed that over 50% of respondents polled agreed that history and culture are strong influences on their choice of holiday destination. 

Culture and heritage tourism is a fast-growing and high-yielding sector

Statistics also indicate that culture and heritage tourism continues to grow rapidly, especially in OECD and APEC regions. We estimate the direct global value of culture and heritage tourism to be well over $1billion dollars, with that of the Asia Pacific region being approximately $327 million.

It is already directly responsible for more than 50 million jobs in APEC countries. And what’s more, the indirect benefits of culture and heritage tourism are thought to be of the order of $1 billion and account for further 75 million jobs across the region. 

There is no denying the fact that culture and heritage tourism tends to attract high-yield tourists. While global figures can be hard to obtain, all available statistics on tourism in various individual markets like the UK, New Zealand, Australia, India , etc. reveal a consistent pattern.

Culture and heritage tourists often stay longer and spend a lot more money in general than other tourists do. In fact, one study showed that a culture and heritage tourist spent as much as 38% higher per day and they stayed 22% longer overall compared to other kinds of travellers.

Culture and Heritage Tourism image Taj Mahal image

Taj Mahal, Indian Symbol

Although the statistical evidence doesn’t show consistency regarding repeat visitors, tourism data on United States’ Culture and Heritage visitors indicates that the level of repeat visitation amongst this group of travellers is higher than that of traditional tourists. 

It builds engagement

Culture and heritage tourists usually visit cultural heritage attractions such as historic buildings and other historic attractions; archaeological sites; state, local, or national parks; art galleries or museums; concerts, plays, or musicals; ethnic or ecological heritage sites; and such attractions. These travellers say that these trips are more memorable than conventional holiday trips since they allow them to learn something new.  This focus on learning skills and gain enrichment has been identified by Trendwatching as a core global trend in travel (and links to broader macro trends in consumer needs).

Culture and Heritage Tourism cycle graph image

The benefits of culture and heritage tourism are amplified through the economy, so their impact is much wider than just the direct spending levels. As Simon Thurley of English Heritage has shown in his Heritage Cycle, heritage tourism has benefits that extend beyond the solely economic. 

What are the benefits of heritage tourism?

Generally, the benefits of heritage tourism can be categorized into three groups: economic, social, and environmental. As they tend to be the highest focus for destinations and policymakers we have focused on the economic benefits first

Economic Benefits of Cultural and Heritage Tourism

  • Injects new money into the economy, boosting businesses and tax revenues 
  • Creates new jobs, businesses, events, and attractions, thus helping diversify the local economy 
  • Supports small businesses and enables them to expand 
  • Promotes the active preservation and protection of important local resources 
  • Builds vital relationships among and within local communities
  • Helps encourage the development and maintenance of new/existing community amenities 

Social Benefits of Cultural and Heritage Tourism 

  • Helps build social capital

heritage tourism machu picchu image

  • Promotes positive behaviour 
  • Helps improve the community’s image and pride
  • Promotes community beautification
  • Builds opportunities for healthy and useful community relationships and partnerships
  • Provides research, education, and work-placement opportunities for students
  • Creates enjoyable opportunities for both local residents and visitors attracted to the cultural arts, history, and preservation
  • Boosts local investment in heritage resources and amenities that support tourism services 

There is evidence that helping maintain buildings of character culture and heritage tourism can contribute to precincts’ innovation and business diversification.  Small businesses based in amazing buildings are typically innovators and provide a core for other larger businesses.

Environmental Benefits of Cultural and Heritage Tourism 

  • Heritage tourism helps encourage a culture of preservation
  • Boost awareness of the tourist site, attraction, or area’s significance
  • Helps encourage local residents and visitors to be mindful of their impact on the natural and built environment 

 Although there is a risk that this type of tourism can lead to a place being ‘loved to death (think the Taj Mahal or the Sistine Chapel ), properly handled it can provide a reason to invest in things like sewage and water resources in areas. 

So that is why we think Cultural and Heritage Tourism is vital to the visitor economy – and destinations should seek to maximise the opportunities it brings. In future articles, we will be delving more deeply into practical opportunities on how to do that. (If you are an MTR member then you can also access more detailed content via the Members Only HomePage .)

Looking for more Culture and Heritage tourism information? You can check out our blog about defining cultural and heritage tourism and cultural tourism opportunities .

Do you want to hear more from us? 

Want to be kept up to date with the latest travel and tourism insights? Join Our Mailing List. Every 2 weeks, we send the latest practical insight for you to apply to your business and destination marketing. 

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About Carolyn Childs

Carolyn has spent more than 25 years’ helping businesses achieve their goals by using research and other evidence to guide strategy and planning – mainly in the aviation, travel and tourism fields. She has worked in more than 35 countries on every inhabited continent and brings a detailed understanding of customers and how to connect with them. As well as running her own businesses, she has worked for organisations such as the International Air Transport Association, TNS (the world’s largest custom research company) and the Travel Research Centre.

built heritage tourism

August 30, 2024 at 7:04 pm

Hi Carolyn,

thank you for this very interesting article. I was wondering, could you perhaps share the source for the study that found out that heritage tourists stay longer and spend more than other kinds of tourists? That would be great!

built heritage tourism

September 6, 2024 at 4:44 pm

Thanks for the feedback. There are actually a number of studies .. for example https://www.ttf.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/TTF-Cultural-Tourism-2016.pdf https://diasporafordevelopment.eu/draft-heritage-tourism-in-the-digital-era/ https://history.sd.gov/preservation/docs/CHTBenefits.pdf

built heritage tourism

February 24, 2024 at 12:36 am

Hello, nice article! Really beneficial for my research. Which year was this published please?

September 6, 2024 at 4:50 pm

Eva I originally wrote this article about 8 or 9 years ago. But the reason that it is still on our website and still features so prominently on Google is that the insights it contains are still bang up to date… (actually without boasting too much we find that with a lot of our research)

built heritage tourism

November 28, 2023 at 7:58 am

Your blog, ‘How Culture and Heritage Tourism Boosts More Than A Visitor Economy,’ brilliantly unveils the multifaceted impact of cultural and heritage tourism. The depth of your analysis and compelling narrative style make this a must-read. It’s a commendable exploration of the broader positive influence that goes beyond economic aspects, showcasing the richness and importance of cultural exploration. Excellent work!

December 22, 2023 at 11:14 am

Thanks Kenny!

built heritage tourism

June 12, 2023 at 12:00 pm

What are the pros of heritage tourism?

June 12, 2023 at 12:40 pm

We try to outline these in the article but this type of tourism helps us preserve our vital cultural assets, gives communities pride and helps build economic opportunity. You can also find out more at the website of the World Tourism Association for Culture and Heritage and at that of ICOMOS .

Of course you have to do it right! This starts by the community understanding what they have, then deciding what they want to share finally finding visitors who want that.

One challenge is the concept of heritage has some negative connotations in that it can seem ‘fusty’ but by showcasing culture and immersion it becomes incredibly engaging. In our work with SHP we are working to overcome this.

Travellers say that they want to get under the skin of a destination – culture and heritage tourism does just that.

built heritage tourism

June 17, 2024 at 11:25 pm

‘It can be incredibly engaging’. From my experience in Amsterdam, where we lived for a few months, your answer to Eve is spot on. Living in Haarlem now – where like Amsterdam the cultural heritage is so well preserved – I have been amazed at how many tourists visit this country. I’m not talking about the weed trend, but the museums and similar cultural attractions, and in all the towns, whether Leiden, Alkmaar, Gouda, Utrecht etc. It makes me think of my home South Africa, where people flock to see Cape Town, the Garden Route and our wildlife – the historic tourist attractions – yet authorities ignore our significant cultural and architectural attractions. Old buildings and structures – whether the 1657 castle of Good Hope in CT, or the buildings reflecting Johannesburg’s 19th century gold mining boom, or famous battlefields – are largely left to rot and decay. There is a racial past, and the (university) Fees Must Fall campaign saw statues of significant historical characters pulled down by students who didn’t even grow up in apartheid. Gone forever. Yet they could’ve been used to tell the story of slavery or colonialism, as an example.

September 6, 2024 at 4:48 pm

Angus I think that this is changing. The next World Tourism Association for Culture and Heritage summit will be in South Africa as the country recognises the value of it. It is also strong in some places like Stellenbosch, but I feel that there is so much more that could be told. The statues one is difficult. I feel we do need to update them, but I have sympathy with the anger that propels this. I also feel it is why culture and heritage needs to recognise difficult or contested histories before they build up to that kind of pressure.

November 23, 2022 at 8:58 am

Hello. Thank you for the great blog today. Have a nice day 강남호빠

June 12, 2023 at 12:45 pm

Glad you liked it…

built heritage tourism

December 30, 2021 at 1:52 am

Thank you for this interesting piece. Can you clarify time frame for stats like this: “We estimate the direct global value of culture and heritage tourism to be well over $1billion dollars, with that of the Asia Pacific region being approximately $327 million.” Is this an annual figure? I am citing your work and want to be sure I am doing so accurately.

October 4, 2022 at 1:57 pm

Dolly it is an annual number. I think this number is now well exceeded though as this has been a huge growth area

October 12, 2021 at 7:49 pm

I would like to know on how can we able to preserve our cultural heritage so as we can ensure imcrease of coming tourists especially to the developing countries, since it has mostly be an obstacle to those nations.

November 29, 2021 at 2:38 pm

I think there is a need to engage your local community and to demonstrate the benefits to them, including opportunities for employment. Community is important as we also need to make sure that the way we promote it benefits the community.

One simple framewok I have seen in Canada is

1) work out what you have. What do you have to share. This doesn’t have to be buildings, intangible culture like cuisine and arts are important to. Audit what you have, collect your stories 2) Agree what you want to share. Agree what you want to share with visitors 3) work out what visitors want. Identify what demand there is for what you have to offer, what customers are interested? then find out about how they book and plan travel (lots of resources in our blog on this) then create a destination management plan (guidance on what to use can be found at https://www.austrade.gov.au/ArticleDocuments/5499/DM_Guide.pdf.aspx ) This will help you work out how and what to do

built heritage tourism

March 2, 2023 at 12:10 am

we are having different activities that we can do as our culture-heritage but due to financial constrain we get it difficult tp practices such kind of activities to promote our culture and also to act as tourism attraction for other continent .

June 12, 2023 at 12:34 pm

Not all culture and heritage activities have to cost a lot. Community-based tourism generally starts small scale and is built by the community asking what it can do rather. This could be simply opportunities for visitors to meet members of the local community or come for a meal at their homes. Talking to visitors already coming (if any) is a good place to start.

built heritage tourism

May 6, 2021 at 12:16 pm

Hi that is a question how heritage attractions make global marketing in order to attract more foreign tourists and enhance their popularities all over the world. Is it possible for the heritage attraction make efforts oversea? like participating in exhibition.

June 15, 2021 at 2:00 pm

Hi Cindy we definitely think attractions can promote overseas, but it depends on the attraction and whether it is likely to appeal to individual visitors. Our advice on promotion for an attraction is normally to do so in partnership with their host destination

built heritage tourism

October 27, 2021 at 6:15 pm

Hie We appreciate what you are doing. We are also trying to come up with a plan to establish a Cultural Heritage and Adventure tourism resort in our rural area in Hwedza. If you are ininterested in helping us please be intouch and will post to pictures of the magnificent sites we wish to show the world. Thank you in advance.

Best Regards Tsungai Maphosa

November 29, 2021 at 2:39 pm

Tsungai … will be in touch soon

built heritage tourism

April 9, 2021 at 7:55 pm

In which year you published it? I need it for my research paper

August 19, 2021 at 3:59 pm

April 2015… we review it each year and it still holds true and is our most read post!

built heritage tourism

January 25, 2021 at 5:39 pm

I have a question in what way how leisure helps the tourism industry?

I’m not sure I understand your question. Can you explain a bit more

built heritage tourism

December 4, 2020 at 5:15 am

I have a question, How to use tourism culture element to attract tourists ?

April 22, 2021 at 11:01 am

It was updated in 2020 but initially published on Apri 18, 2015. We revisit it reqgularly and it still holds true

built heritage tourism

September 14, 2020 at 8:57 pm

Culture or heritage consumption requires understanding how tourist’ emotions and reasons interacting in experiencing these products to ensure long-term sustainability?

October 12, 2020 at 10:33 am

It does indeed. It also means encouraging the right tourists.

built heritage tourism

September 13, 2020 at 12:52 am

I have a question explain the economic benefits, social benefits and environmental benefits of heritage tourism. Specify specific examples /situation

October 12, 2020 at 10:31 am

This could honestly be a whole text book Natalia! The three are highly linked as in what brings money in gets valued and what is valued is protected. It is called the heritage cycle. The UK Lottery fund has a report on the value of conserving and adapting heritage buildings that shows they bring in GDP.

built heritage tourism

August 17, 2020 at 11:50 pm

What are the possible objects of cultural interest that may entice or impact tourist arrivals?

October 12, 2020 at 10:29 am

Krister… the process is a three step one. Identify what you have, Agree with the community what can be shared, identify if there are enough visitors who might be interested and who they are? There isn’t a one size fits all on this.

built heritage tourism

February 4, 2020 at 11:34 pm

In your own words what are the advantages of heritage tourism and what are the disadvantages or challenges of heritage tourism?

March 3, 2020 at 5:57 pm

Mark Great question. I don’t see any disadvantages if it is managed well. The challenges come when it isn’t developed with local buy on, people fail to plan for tourism and culture together and where you don’t let the story lead. The advantages are almost too numerous to mention: social capital, civic pride, economic benefit, a clear case for protecting assets.

built heritage tourism

January 19, 2020 at 11:22 am

I have a question how does cultural heritage promotes tourism?

January 24, 2020 at 11:12 am

Cultural heritage provides a compelling reason to visit. As more people have the ability to travel we see that the desire to understand other cultures grows. Cultural heritage often includes compelling human stories and provokes a sense of wonder. Who hasn’t stood in front of the pyramids and ‘gone wow!’?

There is strong supporting evidence. Research on the impact of gaining World Heritage status indicates that it boosts visitation. It’s a way of curating the ‘best of’ that anyone can understand.

built heritage tourism

July 4, 2019 at 12:37 am

Now, that’s a great question. All places are heritage destinations since all of them have their histories. However, some places are more historically significant than others. In that sense, all travel can be classified as heritage travel.

Attractions can be either heritage attractions or otherwise. In other words, non-heritage attractions like scenery, national parks, nightclubs, safaris, adventure are also reasons why people travel. In this case, heritage has no place.

I would like to ask one question of my own: How important do you think it is for travelers going to heritage destinations, to be acquainted with the history of the place?

September 11, 2019 at 2:18 pm

I am not sure we could police that. Maybe more like encourage it but great interpretation on site can do the same job

built heritage tourism

December 6, 2018 at 4:47 am

I have a great question if you can answer the question by my email address Does tourism exist without heritage or attraction? if you say yes how? if you say no how?

September 11, 2019 at 2:21 pm

It depends what you mean by an attraction … many holidays are about relaxation. They may include sightseeing, but the classic ‘fly and flop’ holiday is still tourism. We now know that even this type of holiday can help with mental and physical health

built heritage tourism

September 21, 2019 at 5:40 pm

YES you are absolutely right that tourism has a lot of advantage for health. Tourism is one which bring happiness in our life and enjoy Full moments. even through it we feel something fresh and new observation.

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paper cover thumbnail

Conservation and Management of Indian Built- Heritages: Exploring the Issues and Challenges

Profile image of Priyakrushna Mohanty

2018, South Asian Journal of Heritage and Tourism

Heritage Tourism has emerged as a catalyst for economic growth thanks to its ability to create alternative jobs, induce developed infrastructures and increase the flow of both domestic and foreign tourists which result in regional as well as national growth. India, a country blessed with remarkable natural and manmade heritages has welcomed this niche form tourism with open arms. However, as a consequence of negligence and lack of proper management skills, the sustainability of these monuments is at cross roads. Improper heritage-awareness, lack of coordination among the stakeholders, inadequate funding as well paucity in understanding the growing demands have further contributed to the sad state. Therefore, conservation, preservation, sustainability and enhancement of these heritages remain the top most priority of the country. Based on the experiences of NGOs and review of major works in the area of heritage management and conservation, this paper puts light on the overall status ...

Related Papers

Heritage Conservation in Postcolonial India: Approaches and Challenges

built heritage tourism

Biswajit Mohapatra

In case of India, it is strongly emphasized that both heritage management and cultural heritage tourism hold huge potential for national development and also will reemphasize the shared relationships, values of cultural tourism, sustainability besides building the capacity for their preservation .In my paper, I have analyzed these two areas so as to make out a case for incorporation of a realistic strategy for encouragement of cultural heritage tourism activities and also to ensure their due protection.

Tiwary, A.N., Tiwary, M.R., & A.K. Rai (eds), India’s Rich Cultural Heritage: Preservation and Promotion. Shaurayam Publication, Varanasi. ISBN: 978-81-958593-4-4.

Rana P.B. SINGH

A country (Bhārat/India) with at least an 8000-year old history in continuity and contrasts, adaptability and superimpositions, a frame of succession-sustenance-sustainability, and a civilization united by its diversities and distinctiveness, keeping live experiences of the richness of culture/s, the glory of the past, the turbulences and triumphs, nevertheless keeping all together leading the march in the cybernetic sphere, while preserving the landmarks of each era, the achievements of each age, the legacy of the regime ― all those tied together in its vast geography that was created, re-created, maintained, continued and passed on from one generation to another on the long passage of time ― thus evolved India’s heritagescapes (Singh and Rana 2011: pp. 87-88). This paper in the short project the heritagescapes on India: Incredible Cultural Heritage. Keywords: Cultural heritage, sacredscapes, Unesco WHList, Intangible Cultural heritage, India.

From India 37 sites are enlisted in the WH List (as of 12 July 2018; 6 July 2019: 38); however, 'The Riverfront Ghats of Varanasi' has not yet been proposed for inclusion, mostly due to the political complexity and a lack of strong support from the stakeholders. Framing tourism and cultural development for national and international resources within the purview of the ancient roots of heritage properties and traditions of spirituality, sacrality and pilgrimages that have a long tradition and continuity in India, the government of India has recently conceptualised a programme of HRIDAY and PRASAD. The programme aims to strengthen and promote the heritage sites and centres of pilgrimage-tourism in making the environment green and sustainable while taking in view the roots of culture, traditions and society and also the image of the site. This chapter attempts to critically examine the rationales for proposing Varanasi as a heritage city in the WH List and the problems that have been faced in this process since the early 2000s. In this context, the status of Varanasi in the scale of the UNESCO WH List, the implications of the past and ongoing Master Plans and the City Development Plan, governance strategies and issues of public awareness are examined and appraised. Under the modern pace of urban planning, the key issues of heritage values and their conservation are put at the margin. The narrative and stories explained here will help in making conservation strategies for other historic-heritage cities in South Asia.

Prashant Banerjee

The concept of heritage refers to the sensibility and common acceptability of the symbol or tradition, both natural and cultural. In Indian context it has its root in the historical past with respect to root and identity associated with the earth or the human craftsmanship. The use and preservation of such heritage are recently promoted under the umbrella of sustainable heritage tourism. The basic idea of the sustainable heritage tourism is to accept heritage as commodity and to preserve and conserve it for the long future. The UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee has recommended a common background and norm for identifying heritage and heritage sites. Of course, the city of Varanasi fulfils all the criteria for getting it accepted in the WHL, it is unfortunately not yet included in the List. This paper presents a synoptic review of the conceptual framework of heritage, sustainable heritage tourism and finally describes the Heritage Zones of Varanasi and their relevance in the development of heritage tourism. Keywords: heritage, heritage tourism, historic city, holy city, Master Plan, heritage planning, zoning, sustainability, heritagescapes.

Speaking Archaeologically Journal Volume IV:1

Navita Gautam

Heritage management is the practice of managing cultural heritage (Joy, 2016). It refers to a constant and active process that involves maintenance and protection of heritage elements through proper management, control and appropriate methods (Ricardo & Ostovich, 2014). This paper attempts to throw light on tangible and intangible heritage management in India in a post pandemic situation. It provides an overview of the current status of built heritage (protected and unprotected) as well as structure and status of institutions involved in heritage management (NITI Aayog, 2019). It has tried to highlight the existing gaps in conservation, archaeology, heritage management along with promotion and marketing of heritage assets in India. The study revolves around four key objectives. First is to highlight the role of heritage management in the socioeconomic heritage development of the country. Secondly, it aims to look at the contribution of heritage before the pandemic situation. Thirdly, it also aims to see the effects of the pandemic situation on heritage. Lastly, it attempts to provide suggestive measures to improve heritage management in the Indian context. The research is descriptive in nature and a qualitative approach has been taken to understand the intrinsic issues involved in heritage management. Media reports, newspapers, published works, research papers, working papers published in the area of heritage management and preservation have been studied.

Randhir and Dr Randhir Singh

Journal ijmr.net.in(UGC Approved)

Preservation of heritage sites and its sustainability is considered to be a significant component and irreplaceable resources for sustainable tourism development. Peoples need to be aware about the benefits and challenges of protection towards cultural heritage resources. To manage the heritage sites at national level adequate steps should be taken by government of India. In an attempt to address major issues related to sustainability have been discussed here. Maximum heritage sites in India are under threats and they required am immediate rescue operation by which they can become a source of development in India.

Divay Gupta

India has an abundance of rich history, culture, traditions, and heritage, but a mere 0.7% of its total built heritage is under some sort of official protection (Khosla, Saini, et al., 2017). The central government’s Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), its state counterparts, and the local urban or rural administrative bodies (ULBs), are all custodians of about ten thousand monuments and archaeological sites combined. This leaves out a vast majority of built heritage, conservatively estimated at close to one million sites, from any means of protection or proper conservation. Historic cities or precincts have not fared well either; out of the eight thousand cities and towns in India, barely twenty are recognized as heritage cities and even fewer have any special planning considerations within their master plans. Out of this plethora of ‘unprotected heritage’, many sites are often in use and represent the ‘living heritage’ of the country. Yet they remain unprotected and vulnerable to insensitive modernization, urbanization, and unchecked development. On the other hand, the majority of India’s recognized architectural heritage and sites, even though legally protected, in effect remain unprotected in the absence of strong enforcement mechanisms (Chainani 2007). In such a scenario, the work of non-governmental and advocacy groups becomes very important. This chapter focuses on the Architectural Heritage Division (AHD) of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH). It traces the evolution of built heritage conservation in INTACH over the last twenty years and how that has shaped conservation philosophy and practice in India more generally. Additionally, this chapter argues how INTACH, through its built heritage conservation programme has been trying to promote an India-centric approach to conservation, which draws from international approaches, but takes into consideration indigenous ways of conservation.

IJIRIS Journal Division

This paper attempts to probe the scope of heritage tourism in India, which can help in shaping our society. Heritage Tourism is considered as one sector that shall propel growth, contribute foreign exchange, enhance employability and result in community development. The most important dimension of heritage tourism is the cultural exchange among various nationalities that visit the country and the cross cultural interface that shall pave way for universal peace and harmony. As on one hand tourism is seen as an economic option and on the other side the greater social and human effect. There is vast scope heritage tourism in India. The government should encourage private enterprises to promote heritage tourism in various less popular areas. For developing heritage tourism in such areas, we need to understand the environment, demography, socio culture, economic and political background of any place for making it an attractive tourist spot. To develop a strategic marketing plan for tourism we have to understand the target customer their needs and wants and how to match it with our heritage tourist spots' infrastructure.

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Exploring the relationships between heritage tourism, sustainable community development and host communities’ health and wellbeing: A systematic review

Roles Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Translational Health Research Institute, School of Medicine, Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia

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Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations School of Social Sciences, Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia, Department of Archaeology, University of York, York, United Kingdom

* E-mail: [email protected]

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations Translational Health Research Institute, School of Medicine, Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia, Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health Program, Burnet Institute, Melbourne, Australia

  • Cristy Brooks, 
  • Emma Waterton, 
  • Hayley Saul, 
  • Andre Renzaho

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  • Published: March 29, 2023
  • https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282319
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Fig 1

Previous studies examining the impact of heritage tourism have focused on specific ecological, economic, political, or cultural impacts. Research focused on the extent to which heritage tourism fosters host communities’ participation and enhances their capacity to flourish and support long-term health and wellbeing is lacking. This systematic review assessed the impact of heritage tourism on sustainable community development, as well as the health and wellbeing of local communities. Studies were included if they: (i) were conducted in English; (ii) were published between January 2000 and March 2021; (iii) used qualitative and/or quantitative methods; (iv) analysed the impact of heritage tourism on sustainable community development and/or the health and wellbeing of local host communities; and (v) had a full-text copy available. The search identified 5292 articles, of which 102 articles met the inclusion criteria. The included studies covering six WHO regions (Western Pacific, African, Americas, South-East Asia, European, Eastern Mediterranean, and multiple regions). These studies show that heritage tourism had positive and negative impacts on social determinants of health. Positive impacts included economic gains, rejuvenation of culture, infrastructure development, and improved social services. However, heritage tourism also had deleterious effects on health, such as restrictions placed on local community participation and access to land, loss of livelihood, relocation and/or fragmentation of communities, increased outmigration, increases in crime, and erosion of culture. Thus, while heritage tourism may be a poverty-reducing strategy, its success depends on the inclusion of host communities in heritage tourism governance, decision-making processes, and access to resources and programs. Future policymakers are encouraged to adopt a holistic view of benefits along with detriments to sustainable heritage tourism development. Additional research should consider the health and wellbeing of local community groups engaged in heritage tourism. Protocol PROSPERO registration number: CRD42018114681.

Citation: Brooks C, Waterton E, Saul H, Renzaho A (2023) Exploring the relationships between heritage tourism, sustainable community development and host communities’ health and wellbeing: A systematic review. PLoS ONE 18(3): e0282319. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282319

Editor: Tai Ming Wut, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, HONG KONG

Received: April 29, 2022; Accepted: February 14, 2023; Published: March 29, 2023

Copyright: © 2023 Brooks et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper.

Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Tourism, heritage, and sustainable development go hand in hand. Socio-economically, tourism is considered a vital means of sustainable human development worldwide, and remains one of the world’s top creators of employment and a lead income-generator, particularly for Global South countries [ 1 ]. For most low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), tourism is a key component of export earnings and export diversification, and a major source of foreign-currency income [ 1 ]. In 2019, prior to the international travel restrictions implemented to contain the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), export revenues from international tourism were estimated at USD 1.7 trillion, the world’s third largest export category after fuels and chemicals with great economic impacts. Tourism remains a major part of gross domestic product, generating millions of direct and indirect jobs, and helping LMICs reduce trade deficits [ 1 ]. It accounts for 28 per cent of the world’s trade in services, 7 per cent of overall exports of goods and services and 1 out of 10 jobs in the world [ 1 ]. Given this, it is anticipated that tourism will play a strong role in achieving all of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but particularly Goals 1 (No poverty), 8 (Decent work and economic growth), 12 (Responsible consumption and production), 13 (Climate action) and 14 (Life below water).

To ensure tourism’s continued contribution to sustainable development efforts, the World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) has established the T4SDG platform in order to “to make tourism matter on the journey to 2030” [ 2 ]. Likewise, in recognition of the relationship between heritage, tourism, and sustainable development, UNESCO launched the World Heritage and Sustainable Tourism Programme, which was adopted by the World Heritage Committee in 2012. This Programme encapsulates a framework that builds on dialogue and stakeholder cooperation to promote an integrated approach to planning for tourism and heritage management in host countries, to protect and value natural and cultural assets, and develop appropriate and sustainable tourism pathways [ 3 ].

The addition of ‘heritage’ creates an important sub-category within the tourism industry: heritage tourism. This study adopts a broad definition of ‘heritage’, which encompasses the intersecting forms of tangible heritage, such as buildings, monuments, and works of art, intangible or living heritage, including folklore, cultural memories, celebrations and traditions, and natural heritage, or culturally infused landscapes and places of significant biodiversity [ 4 ]. This encompassing definition captures ‘heritage’ as it is understood at the international level, as evidenced by two key UNESCO conventions: the 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage , which protects cultural, natural, and mixed heritage; and the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage , which protects intangible heritage. Although the identification, conservation and management of heritage has traditionally been driven by national aspirations to preserve connections with history, ancestry, and national identity, the social and economic benefits of heritage tourism at community levels have also been documented [ 5 ].

Heritage tourism, as one of the oldest practices of travelling for leisure, is a significant sector of the tourism industry. It refers to the practice of visiting places because of their connections to cultural, natural, and intangible heritage and is oriented towards showcasing notable relationships to a shared past at a given tourism destination [ 4 ]. It contributes to global interchange and inter-cultural understanding [ 4 ]. Heritage tourism places economic and political value on recognised heritage resources and assets, providing additional reasons to conserve heritage further to the cultural imperatives for its maintenance [ 5 ]. By drawing on the cultural and historical capital of a community, heritage tourism can contribute to the flourishing of local communities and their positive sustainable development. However, as this systematic review will demonstrate, when applied uncritically and without meaningful engagement with the needs of local stakeholder, heritage tourism can also elicit damaging effects on community health and wellbeing.

First published in 1987, the classic report ‘ Our Common Future’ , more commonly known as the Brundtland Report, conceptualised sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” [ 6 ]. Although this definition still works for many purposes, it emphasised the critical issues of environment and development whilst turning on the undefined implications of the word ‘needs’. In the report, the concept of sustainable development thus left unspecified the assumed importance of distinct cultural, political, economic, and ecological needs as well as health needs. Drawing on the work of globalization and cultural diversity scholar, Paul James [ 7 ], in this study we have defined ‘positive sustainable development’ as those “practices and meanings of human engagement that make for lifeworlds that project the ongoing probability of natural and social flourishing”, taking into account questions of vitality, relationality, productivity and sustainability.

Study rationale

For many years, the impact of heritage tourism has predominantly been viewed through ecological [ 8 , 9 ], economic and cultural [ 10 , 11 ] or political [ 12 ] lenses. For example, it has often been assumed that the conservation of historic, cultural, and natural resources, in combination with tourism, will naturally lead to sustainable local economies through increases in employment opportunities, provisioning of a platform for profitable new business opportunities, investment in infrastructure, improving public utilities and transport infrastructures, supporting the protection of natural resources, and, more recently, improving quality of life for local residents [ 13 – 15 ].

Similarly, the impact of heritage tourism on health and wellbeing has tended to focus on visitors’ wellbeing, including their health education and possible health trends, medical aspects of travel preparation, and health problems in returning tourists [ 16 – 18 ]. It has only been more recently that host communities’ health needs and wellbeing have been recognised as an intrinsic part of cultural heritage management and sustainable community development [ 19 ]. In this literature, it has been hypothesised that potential health implications of heritage tourism are either indirect or direct. Indirect effects are predominantly associated with health gains from heritage tourism-related economic, environmental, socio-cultural, and political impacts [ 20 ]. In contrast, health implications associated with direct impacts are closely associated with immediate encounters between tourism and people [ 20 ]. Yet, little is known of the overall generative effects of heritage tourism on sustainable community development, or the long-term health and wellbeing of local communities. For the first time, this systematic review identified and evaluated 102 published and unpublished studies in order to assess the extent to which heritage tourism fosters host communities’ participation and, consequently, their capacity to flourish, with emphasis placed on the long-term health impacts of this. The primary objective of the review was to determine: (1) what the impacts of heritage tourism are on sustainable community development; as well as (2) on the health and wellbeing of local host communities. Understanding the relationship between heritage tourism, sustainable community development and health is essential in influencing policies aimed at improving overall livelihood in local host communities, as well as informing intervention strategies and knowledge advancement.

This systematic review adhered to the guidelines and criteria set out in the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) 2020 statement [ 21 ]. A protocol for this review was registered with PROSPERO (CRD42018114681) and has been published [ 22 ].

Search strategy

In order to avoid replicating an already existing study on this topic, Cochrane library, Google Scholar and Scopus were searched to ensure there were no previous systematic reviews or meta-analyses on the impact of heritage tourism on sustainable community development and the health of local host communities. No such reviews or analyses were found. The search then sought to use a list of relevant text words and sub-headings of keywords and/or MeSH vocabulary according to each searched database. Derived from the above research question, the key search words were related to heritage tourism, sustainable community development, and health and wellbeing of local host communities. A trial search of our selected databases (see below) found that there are no MeSH words for heritage and tourism. Therefore, multiple keywords were included to identify relevant articles.

To obtain more focused and productive results, the keywords were linked using “AND” and “OR” and other relevant Boolean operators, where permitted by the databases. Subject heading truncations (*) were applied where appropriate. The search query was developed and tested in ProQuest Central on 22 November 2018. Following this search trial, the following combination of search terms and keywords, slightly modified to suit each database, was subsequently used:

(“Heritage tourism” OR tourism OR “world heritage site” OR ecotourism OR “heritage based tourism” OR “cultural tourism” OR “diaspora tourism” OR “cultural heritage tourism” OR “cultural resource management” OR “cultural heritage management” OR “historic site”)

(“Health status” [MeSH] OR “health equity” OR health OR community health OR welfare OR wellbeing)

(“sustainable development” [MeSH] OR sustainab* or “community development” or “local development” or “local community” or “indigenous community”)

The search covered the following bibliographic databases and electronic collections:

  • Academic Search Complete
  • Australian Heritage Bibliography (AHB)
  • Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts (ASSIA)
  • CAB Abstracts
  • ProQuest Central
  • Science And Geography Education (SAGE)
  • Tourism, Hospitality and Leisure

In addition, grey literature were also sourced from key organisation websites including the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), the International Council of Museums (ICOM), the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) and the Smithsonian Institution.

Where the full texts of included articles could not be accessed, corresponding authors were contacted via e-mail or other means of communication (e.g., ResearchGate) to obtain a copy. A further search of the bibliographical references of all retrieved articles and articles’ citation tracking using Google Scholar was conducted to capture relevant articles that might have been missed during the initial search but that meet the inclusion criteria. For the purposes of transparency and accountability, a search log was kept and constantly updated to ensure that newly published articles were captured. To maximise the accuracy of the search, two researchers with extensive knowledge of heritage tourism literature (EW and HS) and two research assistants with backgrounds in public health and social sciences implemented independently the search syntax across the databases and organisations’ websites to ensure no article was missed.

Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Criteria used in this systematic review focused on the types of beneficiaries of heritage tourism, outcomes of interest, as well as the intervention designs. The outcomes of interest were sustainable community development and evidence for the overall health and wellbeing of local host communities. In this systematic review, sustainable community development was defined in terms of its two components: ‘community sustainability’ and ‘development’. Community sustainability was conceptualised as the “long-term durability of a community as it negotiates changing practices and meanings across all the domains of culture, politics, economics and ecology” (pp. 21, 24) [ 23 ].

In contrast, development was conceptualised as “social change—with all its intended or unintended outcomes, good and bad—that brings about a significant and patterned shift in the technologies, techniques, infrastructure, and/or associated life-forms of a place or people” (p. 44) [ 7 ]. To this, we added the question of whether the development was positive or negative. Thus, going beyond the Brundtland definition introduced earlier and once again borrowing from the work of Paul James, positive sustainable development was defined as “practices and meanings of human engagement that make for lifeworlds that project the ongoing probability of natural and social flourishing”, including good health [ 23 ].

Health was defined, using the World Health Organisation (WHO) definition, as “overall well-being” and as including both physical, mental and social health [ 24 ]. While there is no consensus on what wellbeing actually means, there is a general agreement that wellbeing encompasses positive emotions and moods (e.g., contentment, happiness), the absence of negative emotions (e.g., depression, anxiety) as well as satisfaction with life and positive functioning [ 25 ]. Therefore, wellbeing in this systematic review was conceptualised according to Ryff’s multidimensional model of psychological wellbeing, which includes six factors: autonomy; self-acceptance, environmental mastery, positive relationships with others, purpose in life, and personal growth [ 26 ].

In terms of intervention and design, this systematic review included peer-reviewed and grey literature sources of evidence [ 27 , 28 ] from quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods studies. Intervention designs of interest were observational studies (e.g. longitudinal studies, case control and cross-sectional studies) as well as qualitative and mixed-methods studies. The following additional restrictions were used to ensure texts were included only if they were: (i) written in English; (ii) analysed the impact of heritage tourism on sustainable community development and health and/or wellbeing of local host communities; (iii) research papers, dissertations, books, book chapters, working papers, technical reports including project documents and evaluation reports, discussion papers, and conference papers; and (iv) published between January 2000 and March 2021. Studies were excluded if they were descriptive in nature and did not have community development or health and wellbeing indicators as outcome measures.

The year 2000 was selected as the baseline date due to the signing of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by Member States in September of that year. With the introduction of the MDGs, now superseded by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), there was an increase in commitment from government and non-governmental organizations to promote the development of responsible, sustainable and universally accessible tourism [ 29 , 30 ]. Editorials, reviews, letter to editors, commentaries and opinion pieces were not considered. Where full text articles were not able to be retrieved despite exhausting all available methods (including contacting corresponding author/s), such studies were excluded from the review. Non-human studies were also excluded.

Study selection and screening

Data retrieved from the various database searches were imported into an EndNote X9 library. A three-stage screening process was followed to assess each study’s eligibility for inclusion. In the EndNote library, stage one involved screening studies by titles to remove duplicates. In stage two, titles and abstracts were manually screened for eligibility and relevance. In the third and final screening stage, full texts of selected abstracts were further reviewed for eligibility. The full study selection process according to PRISMA is summarised in Fig 1 . A total of 5292 articles from 10 databases and multiple sources of grey literature were screened. After removal of duplicates, 4293 articles were retained.

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Titles and abstracts were further screened for indications that articles contain empirical research on the relationship between heritage tourism, sustainable community development and the health and wellbeing of local host communities. This element of the screening process resulted in the exclusion of 2892 articles. The remaining 1401 articles were screened for eligibility: 1299 articles were further excluded, resulting in 102 articles that met our inclusion criteria and were retained for analysis. Study selection was led by two researchers (EW and HS) and one research assistant, who independently double-checked 40% of randomly selected articles (n = 53). Interrater agreement was calculated using a 3-point ordinal scale, with the scoring being ’yes, definitely in’ = 1, ’?’ for unsure = 2, and ’no, definitely out’ = 3. Weighted Kappa coefficients were calculated using quadratic weights. Kappa statistics and percentage of agreement were 0.76 (95%CI: 0.63, 0.90) and 0.90 (95%CI: 0.85, 0.96) respectively, suggesting excellent agreement.

Data extraction

Data extraction was completed using a piloted form and was performed and subsequently reviewed independently by three researchers (AR, EW and HS), all of whom are authors. The extracted data included: study details (author, year of publication, country of research), study aims and objectives, study characteristics and methodological approach (study design, sample size, outcome measures, intervention), major findings, and limitations.

Quality assessment

To account for the diversity in design and dissemination strategies (peer-reviewed vs non-peer-reviewed) of included studies, the (JBI) Joanna Briggs Institute’s Critical Review Tool for qualitative and quantitative studies [ 31 ], mixed methods appraisal Tool (MMAT) for mixed methods [ 32 ], and the AACODS (Authority, Accuracy, Coverage, Objectivity, Date, Significance) checklist for grey literature [ 33 ] were used to assess the quality of included studies. The quality assessment of included studies was led by one researcher (CB), but 40% of the studies were randomly selected and scored by three senior researchers (AR, EM, and HS) to check the accuracy of the scoring. Cohen’s kappa statistic was used to assess the agreement between quality assessment scorers. Kappa statistics and percentage of agreement were 0.80 (95%CI: 0.64, 0.96) and 0.96 (95%CI: 0.93, 0.99) respectively, suggesting excellent interrater agreement. The quality assessment scales used different numbers of questions and different ranges, hence they were all rescaled/normalised to a 100 point scale, from 0 (poor quality) to 100 (high quality) using the min-max scaling approach. Scores were stratified by tertiles, being high quality (>75), moderate quality (50–74), or poor quality (<50).

Data synthesis

Due to the heterogeneity and variation of the studies reviewed (study methods, measurements, and outcomes), a meta-analysis was not possible. Campbell and colleagues (2020) [ 34 ] recognise that not all data extracted for a systematic review are amenable to meta-analysis, but highlight a serious gap in the literature: the authors’ lack of or poor description of alternative synthesis methods. The authors described an array of alternative methods to meta-analysis. In our study we used a meta-ethnography approach to articulate the complex but diverse outcomes reported in included studies [ 35 ]. Increasingly common and influential [ 36 ], meta-ethnography is an explicitly interpretative approach to the synthesis of evidence [ 36 , 37 ] that aims to develop new explanatory theories or conceptualisations of a given body of work on the basis of reviewer interpretation [ 37 ]. It draws out similarities and differences at the conceptual level between the findings of included studies [ 37 ], with the foundational premise being the juxtaposition and relative examination of ideas between study findings [ 37 ]. Resulting novel interpretations are then considered to transcend individual study findings [ 36 ].

Originating with sociologists Noblit and Hare [ 36 , 38 ], and adopted and expanded upon by other researchers [ 36 , 37 ], meta-ethnography involves a 7-stage process of evidence synthesis and concludes with the translation and synthesis of studies [ 38 ]. The approach centres around the emergence of concepts and themes from included studies that are examined in relation to each other and used to synthesise and communicate primary research findings. In meta-ethnography, the diversity of studies such as the heterogeneity and variation of included studies in the present review, is considered an asset opposed to an issue in synthesis or translation of research findings [ 37 ].

Common threads, themes and trends were identified and extracted from both qualitative and quantitative narratives to generate insight on the impact of heritage tourism on sustainable community development and health. In order to increase reproducibility and transparency of our methods and the conclusions drawn from the studies, the narrative synthesis adhered to the “Improving Conduct and Reporting of Narrative Synthesis of Quantitative Data” protocol for mixed methods studies [ 39 ]. One of the primary researchers (CB) summarised the study findings and narrated the emerging themes and subthemes. The emerging themes were discussed with all authors for appropriateness of the content as well as for consistency. All studies were included in the synthesis of evidence and emergence of themes. The meta-ethnographic approach involved the following processes:

Identifying metaphors and themes.

Included studies were read and reviewed multiple times to gain familiarity and understanding with the data and identify themes and patterns in each study. As noted above, data was extracted from each study using a piloted template to remain consistent across all studies. The aims and/or objectives of each study was revisited regularly to validate any extracted data and remain familiar with the purpose of the study. Themes and, where relevant, sub-themes were identified, usually in the results and discussion section of included studies.

Determining how the studies were related.

Studies were grouped according to WHO regions (see Table 1 ). Thematic analysis was compared across all included studies regardless of region to identify common themes and/or sub-themes to determine how studies were related to one another. Although this review included a widely varied and large number of studies (n = 102), the findings of each study nonetheless had a common underpinning theme of heritage-based tourism. This enabled the identification of communal categories across the studies indicating their relatedness. For example, there were common themes of socio-cultural, socio-economic, community health, wellbeing, and empowerment factors and so on.

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Translation and synthesis of studies.

Themes and, where relevant, sub-themes within each study were considered and compared to the next study in a process repeated for all included studies. Such translation of studies compares and matches themes across a corpus of material, and usually involves one or more of three main types of synthesis: reciprocal translation, refutational translation, and line of argument [ 37 ]. Themes were condensed and streamlined into main thematic areas, in addition to outlining common topics within those thematic areas. The primary researcher (CB) undertook this process with discussion, validation and confirmation of themes and topics from three other researchers (EW, HS and AR). Translation between studies and the resulting synthesis of research findings followed the process of the emergence of new interpretations and conceptualisation of research themes. A line of argument was also developed, and a conceptual model produced to describe the research findings, which is shown in Fig 2 . Both the line of argument and conceptual model were agreed upon by all authors.

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A total of 102 studies were included in the analysis. Of these, 25 studies were conducted in the Western Pacific region, 23 in the African region, 20 in the Region of the Americas, 17 in the South-East Asia region, 12 in the European region, and 1 in the Eastern Mediterranean region. The remaining 4 studies reported on multiple regions. This may at first seem surprising given the prominence of European cultural heritage on registers such as the World Heritage List, which includes 469 cultural sites located Europe (equivalent to 47.19% of all World Heritage Properties that are recognised for their cultural values). However, any studies focusing on Europe that did not also examine sustainable community development and the overall health and wellbeing of local host communities were screened out of this systematic review in accordance with the abovementioned inclusion and exclusion criteria. Results of the data extraction and quality assessment across all included studies are presented in Table 1 . Of the included studies, 24 used a mixed methods design, 22 studies were qualitative, 36 were quantitative and 20 were grey literature (see Table 1 for more detail regarding the type of methods employed). Of these, 48 studies were assessed as high quality (>75), 32 as moderate quality (50–74) and 22 as poor quality (<50).

The major health and wellbeing determinant themes emerging from the included studies were grouped according to social, cultural, economic, and ecological health determinants. Fig 3 presents the proportion of included studies that investigated each of the four health determinants when assessed by WHO region. A large proportion of economic studies was shown across all regions, although this focus was surpassed by the social health determinant in the South-East Asia region ( Fig 3 ). Studies on the social health determinant also yielded a strong proportion of studies across most other regions, although notably not in the African region. This was closely followed by an ecological focus among the Americas, South-East Asia and Western Pacific regions. The Americas had the highest proportion of cultural studies, with the European region being the lowest proportionally ( Fig 3 ).

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More specifically, for studies focused on Africa, 100% of the publications included in this review explicitly investigated the economic benefits of tourism on wellbeing (74% of them exclusively), with European-focused studies reflecting a similarly high interest in economic wellbeing (91% of publications). Across the Americas, economic determinants of wellbeing were investigated in 86% of publications and in the Western Pacific, methods to investigate this variable were built into 80% of included studies. By comparison, this research demonstrates that only just over two thirds of articles reporting on the South-East Asia region shared this focus on economic determinants (65% of publications). Instead, social determinants of wellbeing form a stronger component of the research agenda in this region, with 76% of publications investigating this theme in studies that also tended to consider multiple drivers of health. For example, in 47% of publications reporting on the South-East Asia context, at least three themes were integrated into each study, with particular synergies emerging between social, economic and ecological drivers of wellbeing and their complex relationships.

Similarly, 47% of publication reporting on the Americas also included at least three health determinants. Research outputs from these two regions demonstrated the most consistently holistic approach to understanding wellbeing compared to other regions. In Africa, only 13% of the papers reviewed incorporated three or more themes; in the Western Pacific, this figure is 32% and in Europe only 8% of research outputs attempted to incorporate three or more themes. It seems unlikely that the multidimensional relationship between socio-economic and ecological sustainability that is always in tension could be adequately explored given the trend towards one-dimensional research in Africa, the Western Pacific and particularly Europe.

The associated positive and negative impacts of heritage tourism on each of the health and wellbeing determinants are then presented in Table 2 , along with the considered policy implications. Some of the identified positive impacts included improved access to education and social services, greater opportunities for skill development and employment prospects, preservation of culture and traditions, increased community livelihood and greater awareness of environmental conservation efforts. Negative impacts of tourism on host communities included forced displacement from homes, environmental degradation and over-usage of natural resources, barriers to tourism employment and reliance on tourism industry for income generation and economic stability, dilution and loss of cultural values and practices, civil unrest and loss of social stability, increased rates of crime and disease and lack of direct benefit to local communities. Both positive and negative impacts across each health and wellbeing determinant had acknowledged implications on policy development, many of which revolved around governance and ownership of tourist activities, participation of the local community in tourism sectors and active management of environmental protection programs. Such themes are shown in Table 2 .

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Recent thematic trends can be observed in Table 3 , whereby the percentage of research outputs that investigate economic drivers of health and wellbeing produced since 2019 are shown. In Africa, Europe and the Americas, the proportion of outputs investigating economic health determinants since 2019 is the smallest ( Table 3 ), being 17% in Africa and the Americas, and 36% in Europe, respectively. On the contrary, 50% of Western Pacific region studies since 2019 had research focused on the economic drivers of wellbeing in relation to heritage tourism. Moreover, 65% of studies included economy-focused research in South-East Asia, with more than half of those outputs produced in the last two years ( Table 3 ).

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The proportion of research outputs where local community members were asked to give their opinions as participants is presented in Table 4 , where they were invited to co-lead the research but were excluded from data production. In the Western Pacific region, there was a relative lack of participation (either as researchers or stakeholders) by local communities in the studies included in this review. Meaningful modes of community participation in the South-East Asian region can be calculated to 65%, more closely in line with Africa, Europe and the Americas ( Table 4 ).

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This systematic review is the first of its kind to explicitly consider the relationships between heritage tourism and host communities; specifically, the impact of tourism on host communities’ capacity to flourish and support long-term health and wellbeing. Such impacts were found to be both positive and negative, with either direct or indirect consequences on the development of local governance policies. Our synthesis revealed that there are important regional variations in the way that determinants of health–social, cultural, economic or ecological–drive tourism research agendas. They commonly included considerations of social dynamics, access and health of the local community, empowerment and participation of host communities in tourism-based activities and governance, employment opportunities, preservation or erosion of culture, and environmental influences due to tourism promotion or activity.

Economic impacts represented the strongest focus of the studies include in this review, often to the detriment of other cultural or environmental considerations. With the exception of South-East Asia, studies focused on all other WHO regions (Africa, Europe, the Americas and the Western Pacific) were overwhelmingly built around attempts to understand economic variables as determinants of health and wellbeing, and in some instances were likely to focus on economic variables in lieu of any other theme. Given the steady growth of an interest in economic variables in South-East Asia since 2019, it is plausible that this will soon represent the largest concentration of studies in that region, too.

This trend towards emphasis on economic influences is problematic given that some of the emerging impacts from tourism-related practices identified in this review were found to be common across multiple determinants of health and thus not limited to economic health alone. For example, the limitation placed on access to prime grazing land for cattle belonging to local residents was perceived to be a negative impact both ecologically and economically [ 60 , 141 ]. This may be considered detrimental from an environmental standpoint due to the alteration of the local ecosystem and destruction of natural resources and wildlife habitat, such as the building of infrastructure to support the development of tourist accommodation, transport, and experiences.

Economically, the loss of grazing land results in reduced food sources for cattle and consequently a potential reliance on alternative food sources (which may or may not be accessible or affordable), or in the worst-case scenario death of cattle [ 92 ]. In turn, this loss of cattle has an adverse impact on the financial livelihood of host communities, who may rely on their cattle as a sole or combined source of income. Considered in isolation or combination, this single negative impact of tourism–reduced grazing access–has flow-on effects to multiple health determinants. Therefore, it is important to consider the possible multifactorial impacts of tourism, heritage or otherwise, on the host communities involved (or at least affected) given they may have a profound and lasting impact, whether favourable or not.

The potential interrelationships and multifactorial nature of heritage tourism on the health and wellbeing of host communities were also identified among a number of other studies included in this review. For example, a study from the Western Pacific Region explored connections between the analysis of tourism impacts, wellbeing of the host community and the ‘mobilities’ approach, acknowledging the three areas were different in essence but converging areas in relation to tourism sustainability [ 125 ]. That said, the cross-over between social determinants was not always observed or presented as many studies primarily focused on a single health domain [ 43 – 51 , 53 , 55 – 57 , 59 , 61 , 71 , 74 , 86 – 90 , 103 , 104 , 108 – 110 , 118 , 130 , 134 – 136 , 138 – 140 ]. Some studies, for instance, focused on poverty reduction and/or alleviation [ 134 , 135 ], while others focused solely on cultural sustainability or sociocultural factors [ 109 , 110 , 118 ], and others delved only into the ecological or environmental impacts of tourism [ 86 , 89 ]. As noted above, the majority of studies that focused on a single health determinant considered economic factors.

A common theme that spanned multiple health domains was the threat of relocation. Here, local communities represented in the reviewed studies were often at risk of being forced to relocate from their ancestral lands for tourism and/or nature conservation purposes [ 41 , 60 , 80 , 131 ]. This risk not only threatens their way of life and livelihood from an economic perspective, but will also have social implications, jeopardising the sustainability and longevity of their cultural traditions and practices on the land to which they belong [ 41 , 60 , 80 , 131 ]. Moreover, it may have ongoing implications for the displacement of family structures and segregation of local communities.

Importantly, this systematic review revealed that cultural determinants of health and wellbeing were the least explored in every region and were in many instances entirely omitted. This is at odds with the increasingly prevalent advice found in wider heritage and tourism academic debates, where it is argued that cultural institutions such as museums and their objects, for example, may contribute to health and wellbeing in the following ways: promoting relaxation; providing interventions that affect positive changes in physiology and/or emotions; supporting introspection; encouraging public health advocacy; and enhancing healthcare environments [ 142 – 144 ]. Likewise, Riordan and Schofield have considered the cultural significance of traditional medicine, citing its profound importance to the health and wellbeing of the communities who practice it as well as positioning it as a core element of both local and national economies [ 145 ].

Of greater concern is the finding of this review that of the relatively small number of papers investigating cultural health determinants, many recorded profoundly negative and traumatising outcomes of tourism development, such as a rise of ethnoreligious conflict, loss of ancestral land, a dilution of cultural practices to meet tourist demands, and a loss of cultural authenticity [ 41 ]. Consequently, comparative studies that focus on cultural determinants, in addition to economic and environmental determinants, are currently lacking and should therefore be prioritised in future research. In fact, only one fifth of those papers included in this review adopted the qualitative approach needed to probe the socio-cultural dimensions of health. Novel qualitative research methods to investigate community health are therefore a major research lacuna.

Just as solely equating community health and wellbeing with economic flourishing is problematic, so too is assuming that health is reducible only to clinical care and disease [ 146 ], given that "[i]deas about health … are cultural” [ 146 ]. Early indications of an acceptance that culture and heritage might be central to community health and wellbeing can be found in UNESCO’s 1995 report, Our Creative Diversity : Report of the World Commission on Culture and Development [ 147 ]. More recently, this notion is evidenced in the 2019 Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention [ 148 ] and the 2020 Operational Directives for UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage [ 149 ], both of which indicate the need for a major shift in research foci towards cultural determinants of health and wellbeing if research is to keep pace with assumptions now operating within international policy [ 148 , 149 ].

Although Africa, Europe and the Americas are the three regions with the highest proportion of papers investigating the economic benefits of tourism on health and wellbeing, these regions are also the most responsive to the above recommended changes in policy and debate (see Table 3 ). In these three regions, the proportion of outputs investigating economic health determinants since 2019 is the smallest, demonstrating a recent decline in research that is persuaded by the a priori assumption that economic wellbeing automatically equates to cultural wellbeing. Despite demonstrating the most holistic approach to understanding health and wellbeing across all the themes, an upwards trend in economy-focused research was identified in South-East Asia, since more than half of the economic outputs were produced in the last two years. Such a trend is potentially problematic for this region because it may reinforce the notion that the main benefits of tourism are direct and financial, rather than refocusing on the tension created by indirect effects of tourism on quality of life and community wellbeing.

Conversely, this review demonstrates that the Western Pacific region has persisted with research focused on the economic drivers of wellbeing in relation to heritage tourism (see Table 3 ). This persistence may be explained by the relative lack of participation (either as researchers or stakeholders) by local communities in any of the studies included in this review (see Table 4 ). Indeed, the Western Pacific had the lowest occurrence of community participation and/or consultation in establishing indicators of wellbeing and health and/or opinions about the role of tourism in promoting these.

On the contrary, while seemingly demonstrating the second highest proportion of exclusionary research methods as discussed above, South-East Asia remains the only region where any attempts were made to ensure community members were invited to design and co-lead research (see Table 4 ). Nonetheless, meaningful modes of participation in this region were found to be more closely in line with the deficits found in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. This lack of approaches aimed at including affected communities as researchers in all but one instance in South-East Asia is an important research gap in tourism studies’ engagement with health and wellbeing debates.

Importantly, this failure to adequately engage with affected communities is at odds with the depth of research emanating from a range of health disciplines, such as disability studies, occupational therapy, public health, and midwifery, where the slogan ‘nothing about us without us’, which emerged in the 1980s, remains prominent. Coupled with a lack of focus on cultural determinants of health, this lack of participation and community direction strongly indicates that research studies are being approached with an a priori notion about what ‘wellbeing’ means to local communities, and risks limiting the relevance and accuracy of the research that is being undertaken. Problematically, therefore, there is a tendency to envisage a ‘package’ of wellbeing and health benefits that tourism can potentially bring to a community (regardless of cultural background), with research focusing on identifying the presence or absence of elements of this assumed, overarching ‘package’.

Interestingly, along with the paucity of full and meaningful collaboration with local community hosts in tourism research, there were no instances across the systematic review where a longitudinal approach was adopted. This observation reinforces the point that long-term, collaborative explorations of culturally specific concepts including such things as ‘welfare’, ‘benefit’, ‘healthfulness’ and ‘flourishing’, or combinations of these, are lacking across all regions. To bring tourism research more in line with broader debates and international policy directions about wellbeing, it is important for future research that the qualities of health and wellbeing in a particular cultural setting are investigated as a starting point, and culturally suitable approaches are designed (with local researchers) to best examine the effects of tourism on these contingent notions of wellbeing.

Importantly, a lack of longitudinal research will lead to a gap in our understanding about whether the negative impacts of tourism increase or compound over time. Adopting these ethnographies of health and wellbeing hinges upon long-term community partnerships that will serve to redress a research gap into the longevity of heritage tourism impacts. Furthermore, of those papers that asked local community members about their perceptions of heritage tourism across all regions, a common finding was the desire for greater decision-making and management of the enterprises as stakeholders. It seems ironic, therefore, that research into heritage tourism perceptions itself commonly invites the bare minimum of collaboration to establish the parameters of that research.

In a small number of papers that invited community opinions, local stakeholders considered that the tourism ‘benefits package’ myth should be dispelled, and that responsible tourism development should only happen as part of a wider suite of livelihood options, such as agriculture, so that economic diversity is maintained. Such a multi-livelihood framework would also promote the accessibility of benefits for more of the community, and this poses a significant new direction for tourism research. For example, an outcome of the review was the observation that infrastructure development is often directed towards privileged tourism livelihood options [ 150 ], but a more holistic framework would distribute these sorts of benefits to also co-develop other livelihoods.

Although there is a clear interest in understanding the relationship between heritage, tourism, health and wellbeing, future research that explores the intersections of heritage tourism with multiple health domains, in particular social and cultural domains, is critical. Indeed, the frequency with which the negative impacts of heritage tourism were reported in the small number of studies that engaged local community participants suggests that studies co-designed with community participants are a necessary future direction in order for academics, policymakers and professionals working in the field of heritage tourism to more adequately address the scarce knowledge about its socio-cultural impacts. The accepted importance of community researchers in cognate fields underscores that the knowledge, presence and skills of affected communities are vital and points to the need for similar studies in heritage tourism.

Conclusions

There are five main findings of this systematic review, each of which is a critical gap in research that should be addressed to support the health and wellbeing in local communities at tourism destinations. Firstly, whilst one of the primary findings of this systematic review was the increase in employment opportunities resulting from tourism, this disclosure arose because of a strong–in many cases, exclusive–methodological focus on economic indicators of health and wellbeing. Such research reveals that heritage tourism may significantly reduce poverty and may be used as a poverty-reducing strategy in low-income countries. However, the assumption underlying this focus on the economic benefits of tourism for health and wellbeing is that economic benefits are a proxy for other determinants of health, e.g., cultural, social, environmental, etc., which are otherwise less systematically explored. In particular, the ways in which combinations of environmental, social, cultural, and economic determinants on wellbeing interact is an area requires considerable future research.

Secondly, whilst economic drivers of wellbeing were the most common area of research across all regions, the impacts of tourism on cultural wellbeing were the least explored. Moreover, in many publications culture was entirely omitted. This is perhaps one of the most troubling outcomes of this systematic review, because in the relatively small number of papers that did investigate the cultural impacts of tourism, many reported traumatising consequences for local communities, the documentation of which would not be recorded in the majority of papers where cultural wellbeing was absent. Tourism’s profoundly damaging consequences included reports of a rise in ethnoreligious violence, loss of ancestral land and the threat of forced relocation, not to mentioned extensive reports of cultural atrophy.

Linked to this lack of understanding about the cultural impacts of tourism on wellbeing, the third finding of this review is that there are far fewer studies that incorporate qualitative data, more suited to document intangible cultural changes, whether positive or negative. Furthermore, more longitudinal research is also needed to address the subtle impacts of tourism acting over longer timescales. The systematic review revealed a lack of understanding about how both the negative and positive outcomes of heritage tourism change over time, whether by increasing, ameliorating, or compounding.

The fourth finding of this research is that, to a degree and in certain regions of the world, research is responding to international policy. This review has illustrated that, historically, Africa, Europe and the Americas prioritised research that measured the economic effects of tourism on health and wellbeing. However, after 2019 a shift occurred towards a growing but still under-represented interest in social-cultural wellbeing. We propose that this shift aligns with recommendations from UNESCO’s 2019 Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention [ 148 ] and the 2020 Operational Directives for UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage [ 149 ]. The exception to this shift is the Western Pacific region, where the economic impacts of tourism are increasingly prioritised as the main indicator of wellbeing. Given the overall efficacy of policy for steering towards ethical and culturally-grounded evaluations of the impacts of tourism, we would urge heritage policymakers to take account of our recommendations ( Table 2 ).

The policy implications emerging from this review are the fifth finding and can be distilled into a few key propositions. There is a need for meaningful decolonising approaches to heritage tourism. More than half of the negative consequences of heritage tourism for health and wellbeing could be mitigated with policy guidance, contingent cultural protocols and anti-colonial methods that foreground the rights of local (including Indigenous) communities to design, govern, lead, and establish the terms of tourism in their local area. Although ‘participation’ has become a popular term that invokes an idea of power symmetries in tourism enterprises, it is clear from this systematic review that the term leaves too much latitude for the creep of poor-practice [ 151 ] that ultimately erodes community autonomy and self-determination. Participation is not enough if it means that there is scope for governments and foreign investors to superficially engage with community wellbeing needs and concerns.

Furthermore, calls for ‘capacity-building’ that effectively re-engineer the knowledges of local communities are fundamentally problematic because they presuppose a missing competency or knowledge. This is at odds with impassioned anti-colonial advocacy [ 152 ] which recognises that communities hold a range of knowledges and cultural assets that they may, and should be legally protected to, deploy (or not) as a culturally-suitable foundation that steers the design of locally-governed tourism enterprises. In short, to maximise and extend the benefits of heritage tourism and address major social determinants of health, host communities’ presence in heritage tourism governance, decision making processes, and control of and access to the resultant community resources and programs must be a priority. Future policymakers are encouraged to make guidance more explicit, enforceable and provision avenues for feedback from local communities that offers the protections of transparency. It is also imperative that researchers involve and empower local community groups as part of studies conducted in relation to their health and wellbeing. If current practices remain unchanged, the primary benefit of tourism could easily be rendered inaccessible through lack of education and/or appropriate training which was frequently identified as a barrier to community participation.

Supporting information

S1 checklist. prisma 2009 checklist..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282319.s001

Acknowledgments

We wish to acknowledge Della Maneze (DM) and Nidhi Wali (NW) for their contributions to the literature search and initial data extraction.

Declarations

The authors hereby declare that the work included in this paper is original and is the outcome of research carried out by the authors listed.

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  • Introduction
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  • Published: 28 April 2022

Introduction: Heritage legislation and management

  • James K. Reap 1  

Built Heritage volume  6 , Article number:  9 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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The cultural expressions of humanity take many forms: tangible and intangible, moveable and immoveable, ancient and contemporary, privately or publicly owned. The law in its various forms—traditional law, constitutions, statutory law, treaties, and administrative regulations—is a key tool for protecting cultural heritage. To effectuate these legal protections, governmental agencies are created or designated with management responsibilities for implementing and enforcing the provisions found in law.

Laws to protect the cultural heritage arose at different times in different regions of the world. In classical antiquity, archaeological remains of ancient kingdoms and religious sites were acknowledged as the heritage of past generations, and their protection was the subject of edicts issued by Greek and Roman rulers. Similar approaches to protecting heritage were taken in the Islamic Caliphates and Imperial China and can be found in different world civilisations over time. It can be argued that the roots of contemporary heritage law go back to late 17th century Europe. The royal Placat of 1666 issued by the governing council under the minority of King Charles XI of Sweden is often cited as the first example of heritage law in modern times. In the 18th century other examples of edicts protecting archaeological and architectural resources can be found in Russia, Spain, Portugal and France. However, It was in the 19th century that what we recognise as modern heritage legislation began to appear. The earliest concerns focused on protection of heritage as a basis of national identity. This approach to cultural heritage was carried by European powers to territories around the world where it influenced the development of heritage legislation in colonial empires.

By the end of the century there were laws that recognised antiquities as the property of the state (Greece), a reorganised system of heritage management (Italy) and preservation of architecture and its setting (France). Perhaps one of the most influential acts because of the influence and reach of the British Empire, was the 1882 Ancient Monuments Protection Act . The beginning of international heritage treaties also can be traced to this period. The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 addressed the protection of cultural heritage in time of war along with property associated with arts, sciences and education. During the years between the First and Second World Wars, a number of countries updated their heritage legislation, and the devastation of the Second World War provided further impetus for new and updated heritage legislation.

There were several emerging themes during the post-war period. First, states with a history of heritage legislation updated it, often including provisions for effective documentation and recording. Second, there was an impetus to establish international rules to protect cultural heritage, recognising that heritage extends beyond national heritage to human heritage. Third, states without a history of heritage legislation began to enact it, often based on existing models like British heritage laws, UNESCO conventions, or cultural heritage charters created by professional bodies modern legal protection and management practices developed differently in various world regions, there are many common concerns and approaches.

In North America, the two largest states, Canada and the United States, were both influenced by European models and the emergence in the 19th century of non-governmental historical societies and similar organisations. In both countries, control over historic properties was largely vested in provincial and state governments with limited regulatory power over privately-owned property. It was not until 1966 that a comprehensive federal law based on a collaborative partnership among federal, state and local governments was enacted in the United States.

In Central and South America, heritage legislation was influenced largely by Spanish colonial policies and recognition of indigenous heritage by newly independent countries. Mexico, for example, first declared archaeological sites state property and set up an institution to document these properties, later extending that to colonial heritage. In 1930, inspired by the Venice Charter, Mexico established a government agency responsible for interpreting and preserving its cultural heritage. In the region as a whole, legislation first focused on archaeology and looting, and it was not until the after the middle of the 20th century that legislation focused more strongly on establishing government agencies charged with managing cultural resources.

A long-standing reverence for the past and continuity of culture influenced the development of heritage legislation in Asia. As in Latin America, European powers influenced the law of colonial governments, and the desire of collectors for the region’s antiquities helped to form the first attempts to protect cultural property. In China and Japan, imperial mandates were the source of cultural heritage protection until the late 19th and early 20th century. Heritage legislation in Japan began in the 1890s with protection of ancient shrines and temples and developed a complexity over the years that included structures, landscapes, archaeological sites and traditional crafts. Having no tradition of legislative government, China did not consolidate its heritage law until the latter part of the 20th century.

Heritage law in Oceana has been influenced by British and American law. In Australia, for example, heritage laws exist at the national, state and territorial levels, while aboriginal cultural heritage and sacred sites are generally regulated by separate legislation. Heritage properties are also protected through local government planning schemes.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, there was a long history of protecting sacred places through customary laws, taboos and traditional regulatory practices. Most formal heritage legislation dates from after 1960 following countries’ independence, and reflects the laws of colonial powers and UNESCO conventions. Many in the region were part of the British Commonwealth and share common legal approaches. South Africa provides an example. Its National Monuments Act of 1969, only eight years after independence, protected archeological properties along with paleontological and mineralogical properties. Additional environmental legislation was passed in the 1980s and 90s culminating in the comprehensive National Heritage Resources Act of 1999.

Interest in controlling the collection of antiquities by Europeans and others was an impetus for modern regulation of cultural heritage in the Arab Region. To prevent foreign acquisition of antiquities, the Ottoman Empire passed its first laws in the late 19th century protecting archaeological sites and objects and establishing imperial ownership of antiquities. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, much of the region fell under British and French control and antiquities laws reflected European influence. Many countries did not update their laws until after the 1970s.

Since the latter part of the 20th century, domestic legislation and policies affecting cultural heritage have been strongly influenced by international and regional legislation. The UNESCO conventions on protection of cultural property in armed conflict, preventing illicit transfer, protecting underwater cultural heritage, and recognising intangible cultural heritage have all been influential. However, the 1972 UNESCO Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (World Heritage Convention) has had the most influence on shaping domestic legislation and management practices for the built heritage. Although the Convention sets out a system for listing natural and cultural heritage properties possessing ‘outstanding universal value’ on the World Heritage List, the convention calls on signatories to recognise that they have responsibility for ‘identification, protection, conservation, presentation and transmission to future generations’ of all their natural and cultural heritage. Several world regions have also developed treaties for cultural heritage protection including Latin America, the Pacific and Europe. The Granada Convention and the LaValetta Conventions in Europe are examples of regional legislation aimed at protecting aspects of the architectural and archaeological heritage.

Cultural heritage legislation protecting archaeological sites, designated buildings, conservation areas or districts, and cultural landscapes continues to vary across the world. Within different countries, primary authority over heritage may be the purview of national, regional or local authorities, or a combination thereof. On the national level, heritage conservation is generally overseen by a government ministry with authority over designation and protection of heritage properties and in some cases control of development that would affect their character. In other cases, a ministry may be responsible for protecting both natural and built sites or have purview over both culture and a related area such as tourism. Urban conservation is often the purview of agencies responsible for town planning. Other agencies such as those responsible for the environment, transportation, or energy may also impact cultural heritage. In some countries there is a separate system for regulating the conservation of religious buildings. At the local level, heritage conservation is often part of the land use planning and development processes which are seen as a basic conservation tool. In addition to cultural property regulation, other laws dealing with tourism, construction codes, life safety, disability access, and human rights also impact the conservation of cultural heritage.

Today, heritage legislation and management practices continue to evolve. While concerns that motivated the creation of earlier heritage legislation remain relevant, a number of new issues are helping to shape its further development. These include the role of contemporary architecture in historic environments, new technologies for heritage management, the rights of indigenous people and local communities to control their cultural heritage, the role of cultural heritage in sustainable development, and the impact of climate change on both natural and cultural heritage.

This special issue of Built Heritage examines the approach of several countries and regions as they address common concerns and unique challenges.

In his article ‘The Development and Institutional Characteristics of China’s Build Heritage Conservation Legislation’ Song Zhang traces the development of China’s national cultural heritage legislation from the late Qing Dynasty to the present, with an emphasis on built heritage. He argues that while the legislative system for heritage conservation that emerged after 2000 had contributed positively to the conservation, use and regeneration of the urban and rural heritage, there remains a lack of national legislation that supports regional efforts. He notes that the ongoing extensive reform of the urban and rural planning management system has a great impact on the management of the historic urban landscape, creating an urgent need for updating the relevant legislation for historic cities. He also suggests that more attention must be paid to balancing individual property rights and the public’s rights to the management and conservation of heritage.

Afolasade Adewumi examines the development of the cultural heritage management systems in Nigeria from the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial eras in her article ‘Built Heritage and Planning Laws in Africa: the Nigerian Experience’ In many ways, the Nigerian experience is representative of the experience of other countries in the region. Adewumi argues that Nigeria must document the traditional management systems that have sustained indigenous heritage sites through the centuries and incorporate them in a holistic approach to harmonise the various heritage management systems. At the same time, a strong coordination between urban planning and heritage preservation authorities is necessary to facilitate sustainable development while preserving the built heritage.

Many states in the Arab Region have seen major updates to their national heritage legislation, incorporating many provisions of the World Heritage Convention. Michał Wosiński’s article, ‘New Perspectives on World Heritage Management in the GCC Legislation,’ examines the recent legislation and its potential to improve management systems in terms of integrated approaches, monitoring and enforcement. He observes that planning regulations in the region do not provide strong support for cultural heritage in terms of cohesion between heritage law, planning law, environmental protection and impact assessment.

Climate change is one of the greatest threats facing the world's cultural and natural heritage and addressing this critical situation has become an urgent priority. Current legislative frameworks are often inadequate to address the growing challenge. Building on earlier comparative cultural law scholarship, Ryan Rowberry examines the legislative and management tools used by three countries to protect their coastal resources in his article, 'Climate Change, Coastal Built Heritage, and Critical Challenges Facing Heritage Law Frameworks on the Unites States, United Kingdom, and France'. By utilising comparative case studies that identify critical challenges and the inadequacy of current legal and management frameworks, he illustrates the need for innovative tools and international cooperation to address this growing threat.

Together these articles provide insight into the challenges facing the cultural heritage in different regions of the world and the threats posed by global crises such as climate change and unstainable development while highlighting the potential of legislation and management approaches that can be used to address them.

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Reap, J.K. Introduction: Heritage legislation and management. Built Heritage 6 , 9 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s43238-022-00059-9

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