Posts Tagged ‘ sustainable tourism ’

No Ms Carne, you are wrong. Tourism and tourists are valuable for destinations and the tourists themselves.

The Azores has become the world’s first destination to be awarded the Platinum Quality Coast Award by the largest international certification programme for sustainable tourism destinations, Quality Coast.

Not wishing to be rude, if you think of Ecuador at all, you probably think of the Galapagos Islands, giant tortoises and Charles Darwin. About the mainland country we probably know very little about. That might be about to change.

As one goes off another returns.
Last week, in Brasilia, UNESCO met to approve a new list of additions to its World Heritage Register. There were lots of additions and announcements and we’ll have a fuller review after the meeting is over on Tuesday.. There are two announcements though, about places that nearly everyone will know.
Sad to relate that the Florida Everglades have returned to being listed as endangered on the UNESCO list of heritage sites in danger. In addition the tropical forests of Madagascar have been added as well. But the Galapagos Islands and Machu Picchu have been taken off as UNESCO views the efforts by Ecuador and Peru to safeguard them as succeeding.

The interest in green/environmental/sustainable tourism has grown massively over the last decade and just about every destination preaches its green credentials. Brighton, for example, has been voted green capital of the UK. Kent has recently won £700,000 funding from the European Union for “coastal actions on sustainable tourism” whatever that means and Anglesey received funds a little while ago for coastal improvements. From further afield comes an example from South Korea where it is suggested that the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea becomes an ecological preservation area to protect wildlife.

For quite a few people the lure of going somewhere out-of-the-way is quite strong. Undeveloped areas that show how a country or an area really is as opposed to what tour operators have created means that certain places are not prepared for tourism. Others are so fragile from an economic or environmental standpoint that many people question whether tourists should be allowed to go there at all.One such place is Antarctica. It isn’t a place many of us can afford to go to but that
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Not subscribing to “Post Medieval Archaeology,” it has taken me a little while to catch up with story of the excavations on Robinson Crusoe Island off the coast of Chile. It was the BBC website and The Times that alerted me to a story that archaeologists led by David Caldwell from National Museums Scotland had found evidence of an early European occupant on the island.Since this is the island that Alexander Selkirk ( he whose story was written by Daniel Defoe as Robinson Crusoe) stayed
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