Cultural Routes for Sustainable and Regenerative Development

Dear Colleague,

Cultural routes have very satisfactory properties. They help in the conservation and appreciation of places and their nostalgia, memory, and tradition (Murray and Graham, 1997). Moreover, they improve the attractiveness and sustainability of such places (Meyer, 2004) and bring multiple actors to work together (Buhalis, 2000; Shih, 2006). Cultural routes attract a tourist model that seeks the history and identity of the region, as well as interaction with the local population.

The new cultural routes are considered a value of sustainable development. This topic will be expanded upon in this work, considering them as economic clusters in which the members can share and conserve their attractions and as contributors to tackling depopulation and the effects of climate change in the most disadvantaged areas. These cultural routes have the potential for self-tourism and proximity trips, which have a lower environmental impact and offer greater security in the face of health crises.

On the other hand, the routes around the monumental and intangible heritage are considered. These cultural routes provide tools for the implementation of other forms of regenerative tourism, such as ecotourism, organic farming, or apitourism (i.e., routes of community tourism that reinvest the income in economically depressed populations), or ecological tourist services, such as ecovillages and circular economy hotels. In a logic of closed non-disruptive tourism consumption (Pearce and Turner, 1980; EU Commission, 2018; Ellen MacAthur, 2010), environmental and economic aspects are complemented.

Cultural routes such as the Camino de Santiago, the Silk Road, and the pilgrimage to Mecca have been pioneers in the generation of commerce, the travel industry, and intercontinental finances. The principles postulated by Daniel Wahl, in Designing Regenerative Cultures (2016), are now the spur of the necessary social change, within the framework of regenerative development, and will be applied to the tourism sector in this work. This is a new paradigm that seeks to reverse the degeneration of natural systems and design human systems that can co-evolve with them, without forgetting that the planet continues to relate its potential for diversity, complexity, and creativity. Moreover, it enables the relationships between towns and settlements to be strengthened.

The work will develop a new project through the study of traditional routes (pilgrimage, archaeological, or artistic routes) and new ones, such as genealogical tourism in Europe, ethnic tourism in the Americas, or community tourism in Africa. Cultural routes linked to ecological, gastronomic (e.g., kosher and halal routes), or other characteristics will also be considered.

This Special Issue seeks contributions from specialists in development economics, tourism, agronomy, anthropology, sociology, architecture, and art history in analyzing these routes and welcomes interdisciplinary approaches.

Prof. Dr. Ángeles Rubio-Gil
Prof. Dr. Jesús Alberto Valero-Matas
Prof. Dr. Guillermo Vázquez-Vicente
Guest Editors

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• cultural routes
• cultural tourism
• regenerative tourism
• sustainable development
• intangible heritage
• tourism cluster
• tourism and development