Sustainable Tourism – Our principle

For a long time, tourism was considered to be an industry in which it was not credited with negative impacts, culturally, socially or environmentally. From the seventies on, reality changed and the first voices denouncing the negative effects of tourism began to appear. (Faulkner e Tideswell, 1997 in Oliveira, E., 2010).

There is global agreement on the need to promote sustainable tourism development, there is also agreement on the understanding that tourism, in order to develop in a sustainable way, has to affirm itself on four fundamental pillars:

. Environmental Sustainability: a balance is sought between human activity, development and protection of the environment;

. Economic Sustainability: better use of resources and more efficient management must be promoted;

. Social Sustainability: the receiving community, its historical and cultural heritage and its interaction with visitors must be attended to, in order to increase the self-esteem and standard of living of local communities, respecting their cultural traditions;

. Political Sustainability: aiming for a strategy that makes it possible to coordinate all initiatives, at national and local level, in order to allow the reduction / cancellation of regional asymmetries and that favors the sustainable development of the country as a whole.

And it is in this sense that we have developed a tourism strategy that has as principles:

i) Ensure fair distribution of benefits and costs;

ii) Generate local jobs, direct and indirect; stimulates profitable domestic industries;

iii) Diversify the local economy, especially in rural areas where agricultural employment may be sporadic or insufficient;

iv) Be participative in decision-making between the actors, and incorporate planning and zoning, ensuring the development of tourism appropriate to the carrying capacity of the ecosystem;

v) Demonstrate the importance of natural and cultural resources for the economy of a community and its social well-being, helping to preserve them.