Local population and visitors: perceptions and preferences of landscape in a touristic destination

Resumo

A remarkable feature of the tourist areas is the cultural change of local populations. One of its implications could be the variation of the appreciation by these societies of its traditional landscapes. Thus, the accelerated cultural changes may be influencing the character and personality of a society. The phenomenon can have diverse consequences both for tourism and for local people themselves. Most visitors, meanwhile, feel the landscape and the climate as the main attractions of a destination. The mountains, the coast, the historical heritage and the traditional rural landscape are the focus of the extended visit. All these sites seem to have to offer a high climatic comfort, and the landscape must not show too much signs of abandonment. Correspondences 'visitors-landscape' and 'local population-landscape' deserve to be compared. Previous work has described and mapped the former correspondence in terms of 'demand' and 'offer'. The relationship 'landscapesocio-economic structure' of the local population has also been studied, allowing us to create scenarios of change. In this paper we focus on the assessment of landscape by local populations and compare it with perception of visitors. The results show the complementarity between the appreciation of the local landscape by visitors and native population. While the former value the most the variable 'sun' as the essential aspect in their perception of the landscape and primary motivation for their visit, the latter values the rural cultural landscape as something associated with their traditional environment, showed as a reason to be proud. This could be explained by means of a relaxed visit to the island from an anthropologist's perspective. These results can also be mapped and could better explain the comparison between the assessments of the landscape by local population with the landscape demand by visitors within the context of the research to which the present paper belongs.