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Cultural tourism, cultural landscape, social culture
When we observe nowadays trends in a global tourism movement, its quantity and quality, we see the permanent rising quantity of travels, unfortunately broken after the tragedy of The September 11th. Also we see decreasing tourist wave in Poland during last years. The reasons are at first less interest of foreigners after first years of opening frontiers. On the other hand the reason is still not enough convenient quality of tourist accommodation and service, except of a few expensive and elitarian places. But simultaneously we can see much positive movement even in deep province in the field of development of gentle tourist amenities.
There is a special character of cultural tourism in or from East Europe on the way towards Western standards. More and more reach or middle reach inhabitants of post communist countries joins a global tourism stream, beside tourists from the West and from Japan. So there is an important task for organizers of tourism in Poland, in the respect of arranging the stream of foreign tourists towards Poland.
Phenomena of cultural landscape and its beauty, had been for years a subject of studies in Poland, done by geographers, landscape architects, and tourism theoreticians. One can distinguish three main branches of it, accord-
ing to spatial scale. They are as follows: 1. Macro scale, 2. Mezo scale, 3. Micro scale. The first is a great size of tourist product, often informal, mainly open landscapes with several smaller elements of interest. A domain of projecting in this scale is physical planning. The second is a tourist product created by one selected spatial ensemble, framed by visible border-limits, having its own Gestalt. Finally the third is a punct-product, one single object. All three kinds have the common feature, which is a basic one - the beauty.
Research and creation of good cultural tourism, needs understanding different fields of cultural tourism, as well their spaces and places. Especially important nowadays are such a selected branches as: 1. Educational tourism, 2. Religious tourism, 3. Nostalgic tourism, 4. Tourism of events. The first is a classical cultural tourism, concentrated in famous historical, traditional, often monumental products. The second is contemporary pilgrimage, searching for quiet and hope in places of cult. The third is coming to roots, towards places of parents, and of own young years. It is very important after Second World War, when people, even whole nations were removed all over the world. Finally the fourth is even more characteristic for nowadays tourism; it is connected with important, often tragic events, which happened and marked the space.
As conclusions one can say that cultural tourism has much to do with cultural landscape, and with human behavior - cultural or opposite. "Landscape" means broadly - "the picture of The Country". Following the great writer Ortega y Gasset we can travesty this sentence as: "show me your landscape, and I shall tell you who you are".
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