18. The Challenge of Tourism in Terraced Landscapes

Terraced landscapes contain and produce natural and cultural values which tend to be highly relevant to tourism. The variable interactions developing between the tourism industry and local agricultural systems sustaining terraced cultures may have different consequences on both local development and tourism trends. After a brief theoretical introduction into landscape–tourism interrelationships, this chapter addresses the long array of circumstances and consequences of tourism development in terraced landscapes. With the aid of a series of diagrams which serve as its analytical framework, the chapter lays out and discusses the empirical circumstances and types of challenges stemming from different types of tourism in such landscapes, in terms of polarities: (a) types of landscape uses from the demand side of tourism, (b) impacts of tourism on the agricultural system of these landscapes and (c) impacts of tourism on the socio-economic system of terraced landscapes. Both risks and opportunities incurred by tourism impacts on visited landscapes are especially pressing in the case of terraced landscapes, running the full range from most negative (i.e. destruction) to most positive (i.e. rejuvenation) possible consequences. Even though the diagrams used in this chapter present mass and mild tourism as polarities, they serve as a basis for elaboration on the attractions and expectations of tourists and local communities, in such cases, and on landscape-related tourism consequences on local agricultural and broader local/regional socio-economic systems. They also allow for some conclusive remarks on the environmental, economic and social/cultural sustainability of terraced landscape tourism, in the context of broader local/regional development, while laying the ground for further analysis.