Back to the Future in «Observatorio Medioambiental», n.8 2005, Universidad Complutense, Madrid.

Culture is an increasing factor, especially in the European Union, and cultural reasons are intervening more and more in the tourist movements. Culture becomes an element of sustainability in several ways: educated people pay more attention to the protection of environment and monuments; they are requesting high quality products; they can recognise logos certification and the accomplishment of national and international standards. Cultural tourism is a process of growing nature due to the increasing well-being of western society, which determines a strong demand of acculturation by public organisms and private persons. “Cultural” is a very ample term, embedding religious, sport, amateur and professional interests (maybe medical too). Heritage is obviously important too for cultural tourism. Cultural heritage is protected and supported by UNESCO, which, through the General Conference in the 1972, established an unique international instrument: the “World Heritage Convention” that “recognizes and protects both cultural and natural heritage of outstanding universal value”. The importance of cultural tourism for the development is recognised by several scholars; according to Lazzarotti (2003, p. 103): “tourism and heritage take part in national construction and in its reinforcement; it is in the human condition itself to keep relationships with time, the and the “others” (ibidem, p. 108). In the connection between tourism and heritage, each society should find the structures in which to re-formulate its own values or practices. The originality of the tourism-heritage relationship is founded on its capacity of federating the differences; it is polymorphous and multicultural, its continuity depends on how it manipulates the ties among these differences. Tourism is intimately connected with the issues of sustainable development, (Hall, 1999, p.1). Tourism is a big business so it cannot be developed in itself, or “per se”, but in a holistic milieu. The complex nature of the tourism industry and the often poorly defined linkages between its components are major barriers to the integrative strategic planning which is a prerequisite for sustainable development to counteract the fact that: “Tourism development is often fragmented and poorly coordinated” (Hoelscher, 1998, p. 18). Tourism should become an integrated element in a more ample system directed to the general development. Raffestin too (1988) points to territorialisation processes, and in his opinion we should recuperate the situation of dynamic relationship among social, ecological and biological factors, involving a systematic relationship between the three sub-systems noted by Camagni (1996): the economic, the social, the physic-environmental. In this process the priority should be given to the quality of the evolution process and ultimately to the well-being of local system (Cetti Serbelloni, 2003). Only a poly-functional valorisation of the tourism into which to highlight all the physical, social, economic, and historical values, among which cultural heritage is the most important, may be viable in a post-industrial society.