18.3Tourism Development in Terraced Landscapes: Attractions and Expectations

18.3.1 General Trends and Main Issues

Landscapes characterized by terraces share some common features. Basically, they are rural landscapes of historical origin: some of them have very ancient origins (thousands of years), others are more recent (first half of the twentieth century), but they are all connected to traditional pre-industrial agriculture, before the sector’s large-scale mechanization and industrialization. Such circumstances have different consequences, in terms of both local development and tourism trends.

These rural landscapes often suffer from abandonment, caused by marginality (mountain or hilly areas) and by collapsing rural systems, when farmers’ incomes become too low. Residual ‘heroic’ agriculture, then, is often the only way to stem abandonment and re-naturalization and prevent hydrogeological instability and the collapse of terraces. At the same time, terraces create very original vertical landscapes, with spectacular views. They are relevant also from the point of view of heritage, as cultural landscapes, witnesses of ancient practices in the context of humans’ interrelationships with their landscapes (see Chap. 15). They may, thus, offer a long series of experiences that cater to various special-interest and alternative forms of tourism, such as agro-tourism, eco-tourism, gastro-tourism, adventure, history, culture. Obviously, tourism trips involve a variety of motives and activities (tourism demand), normally requiring a range of service, commodity and other consumption (tourism supply). As will become obvious in the following sections, tourism in terraced landscapes often combines many or most of such activities, depending, of course, on the profile of the consumer.

We may distinguish between locally versus externally induced tourism, which is tourism that is more instigated and managed by local actors and stakeholders, in contrast to tourism that is propelled by the global tourism industry and system (tour operators, multinational corporations, big industry, etc.). In the former case, we normally include milder forms of terraced landscape tourism, mostly controlled and operated from the bottom-up, whereby profits, costs and benefits often tend to circulate or be recycled in the destination locality or region—either in the local/ regional tourism industry itself, or in the local societies, as advocated in Garajonay National Park, Spain, through their Action Plan and Strategy of implementation of the European Charter for Sustainable Tourism in Protected Areas (ECST). In the latter case, profits, costs and benefits normally return to these international actors of the tourism industry and fail to be used towards locally or regionally sustainable development goals and practices. Normally, these terraced landscape tourism activities involve higher demand, larger markets, heavier tourist flows and more intense uses and concentrations of tourist activity at the destination, than the former types of tourism, which tend to cater more to local, regional, internal/domestic, and/ or limited tourism or recreation markets.

18.3.2 The Demand Side

We will first turn to the demand side of tourism. Here, we may distinguish between tourism that is less or more involved in local matters and activities, for instance between the all-inclusive (organized or package) type of tourist and milder forms of tourist activities—usually more involved and participating in local community activities and life (i.e. in grape or fruit harvest, drystone wall building). We may distinguish between different types of resource use by the tourists, at the visited terraced landscape destination: natural features, cultural assets, leisure amenities, experiential stimuli, etc. (i.e. rural pilgrimages and cultural routes). We may also postulate that terraced landscapes, by nature and by function, are more amenable to milder, more resource-conscious types of landscape-oriented activities, with the underlying—often unstated, but always implied—the aim of achieving sustainability and multifunctionality (i.e. through the promotion of local products). Accordingly, milder (less intensive, alternative or resource-conscious) types of tourist activity impart fewer adverse impacts on these landscapes, leaving a lighter imprint on them, thus contributing more to their sustainable function and development.

18.3.3 The Supply Side

The local/global levels of tourism development are often interlinked and act concurrently, as they are also interlinked with the supply side of tourism, which we turn to, now. The original features and critical aspects of terraced landscapes introduced above call tourism into question, from two different points of view. From the tourist point of view, these semi-natural rural landscapes, with spectacular views and heritage elements, attract tourists in search of otherness, exotic and original scenery, cultural landscapes and history, and ‘authentic’ good food and wine, far from the urban chaos, in a ‘harmonious coexistence between man and nature’ (Zahn and Jin 2015, p. 664). These aspects of the terraced landscapes become poles of tourist attraction. From the point of view of the local community, tourism is seen as an economic activity able to curb terrace abandonment and preserve both the cultural heritage and slope stability, also because it increases local incomes. In fact, terraced landscape tourism can often be practiced as a secondary business, because it produces ancillary revenue, which may sustain people’s main source of income (agriculture or other jobs). As will be further elaborated below, tourism and agriculture are not only interrelated, but they are both parts of a broader socio-economic system. In fact, dealing with tourism in difficult contexts, such as terraced landscapes, implies also recognizing that two different rationalities might be employed in developing tourism, both in internally and externally induced ‘touristification’: one that views the increase of tourism as a benefit in itself (instrumental rationality) and one which aims at preserving and maintaining the ecological and economical

system of a terraced landscape (value rationality) (Xiaoyun et al. 2013, p. 273). Combining these two rationalities, local communities—vying for territorial competitiveness in a global market—may take up the challenge of activating latent natural and cultural resources, through the development of small-scale and place-based tourism.

Generally speaking, tourism development in terraced landscape seems an effective win–win strategy, or even ‘the goose that brings the golden eggs’ (Jansen-Verbeke and McKercher 2013, p. 245). Tourism, however, is not an automatically or unequivocally positive solution for terraced landscapes, as will be shown in Sects. 18.4 and 18.5. Moreover, recognizing the values of the terraces is not a sufficient condition for tourism attraction and stimulation. In order for the supply side of tourism to become competitive and attractive, it also requires investment in various infrastructures, accommodation, facilities, transportation and communication, as well as appropriate management and marketing strategies. The tourism potential may also be recognized either internally or externally. In the first case, tourism tends to be developed and managed more by local or regional actors and attracting mostly local and regional tourism. In the second case, when the terraced landscapes are of outstanding value and high attractiveness, such as in UNESCO heritage sites, tourism develops intrinsically, attracting global flows, in the context of the global tourism industry, and involving also both external and international actors.

18.3.4 Our Approach

Diagrammatically, we may present types of tourism uses of terraced landscapes— including characteristics and repercussions of tourist uses of the terraced landscape— as follows (Fig. 18.1).

Despite the fact that such polarized categorizations may be a bit too simplistic, they may also facilitate our attempt to distinguish between types of tourist (terraced) landscape consumption. Specifically, less involved types of tourist use and activity imply a superficial consumption of the landscape, generally speaking, in the form mainly of scenery or image. This type of consumption is often referred to in terms of ‘sightseeing’, landscape as a view, a panorama or as unique/striking assemblage of structures or forms. Such partial and uninvolved consumption of the visited landscape, merely as a visual stimulus or set of signs of the visited destination (MacCannell 1992), finds frequent application in the case of terraced landscape destinations, especially when the main form of tourism developed in these destinations is not primarily motivated by or revolving around the terraces themselves. It becomes a stage set, in which tourism takes place—a mere backdrop for tourism activity—by simply providing appropriate, supporting or just beautiful background images for consumption by tourists who may simply be passing through, on their way to other destinations, or targeting their visit and consumption to other resource and amenity uses, rather than acknowledging and enjoying the terraced landscapes