Managing tourism and cultural heritage in historic towns: examples from Romania

Abstract

Due to the impressive development of the cultural heritage tourism, there is an increasing need to investigate the relationship between tourism and cultural heritage management, in order to avoid conflicts that may occur from parallel, independent development of these activities. At present the Romanian historic towns face an increasing process of fast tourism development within many rehabilitation projects that take place on historic monuments. Assessing their tourism potential in a realistic way may help in developing sustainable tourism at cultural destinations. In this context, the assessment matrix method proposed by McKercher and du Cros is applied to 10 case studies of Romanian historic towns, as a first step in tourism development planning. A refinement of this method is proposed by considering the distribution of the qualifiers assigned to the indicators that are being assessed. The matrix method is shown to be a useful tool for a correlated approach to both tourism development and cultural heritage management.

Keywords:

• historic centres
• cultural heritage
• cultural tourism
• tourism potential matrix
• Romania

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Profs Hanna Derer and Teodor Octavian Gheorghiu for their useful discussions.

Notes on contributor

Iuliana Bucurescu is an architect and assistant professor at the Department of Architectural Conservation and Restoration in the city of Sibiu (a branch of the Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism, Bucharest), and a member of ICOMOS Romania. She recently defended a Ph.D. thesis, her areas of interest being the relationship between tourism development and the cultural heritage protection and conservation, restoration of historic monuments and cultural tourism.