The Alternative Path of Strategic Tourism for Alcobaça: Legacy and Sustainability

Abstract

The Cistercian Monastery of Alcobaça – a World Heritage site – is the prime monument in the local area, and is visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists every year. This flow of tourists alone represents an enormous potential and an outlook for the creation of a network-based tourism model that is able to stimulate a distinctive and complementary set of cultural attractions. This network, although informal, is largely already operational, and is composed of important natural and cultural features. This article takes as its starting point the statement that there is no formal, operational tourism model contributing to Alcobaça’s heritage brand that uses the Cistercians as its reference point. Using a deductive method, the paper’s primary goal is to carry out a theoretical reflection on the theme of cultural tourism as a strategic element for the very preservation and sustainability of legacy and heritage. This study aims to frame the still controversial and under-conceptualised relation between the recognition of an area’s historical value and the path to future sustainability of material and immaterial heritage based on tourism models as mechanisms for building identity and, at the same time, disseminating culture. This article reviews the historical background that has strengthened the unique Alcobaça “brand” so that it comprises the extent of the territory as a founding, strategic element for preserving cultural heritage and, ultimately, local development. An understanding of these two factors – historical (and immaterial) and territorial (material) – determines the formation of a sustainable way based on a tourism model that takes cultural heritage as its main bond. It can be concluded that by following this path, tourism services can form vital leverage for Alcobaça to affirm its political and economic position. In this context, the idea of territory takes centre stage and, by preserving and revitalising heritage and socio-cultural manifestations, it can create a compendium of identity that should be easily recognised inside and outside the area through a distinctive chain, a unique brand, which includes the tourist value of the product as well as historical features.