Roteiros turísticos na área metropolitana do Porto - continuidades e polarizações

Abstract

Contemporary tourism, in its most diverse territorial and social contexts, confronts us with what are (and have been) the political priorities that design the local tourist offer in Portugal. The analysis of the tourist policies of the municipalities of the Metropolitan Area of Porto at the present time, and after the last elections municipalities, takes us to a first empirical fact: the growing programmatic interest in tourism in local political programs in recent years. In another sense, more peculiar and central, the diversity of the local tourist offer when understood as an additional and circular development vector of the same metropolitan territory. To the empirical political regularities that we established between 1980 and 2001, in a metropolitan territory composed of 9 councils, after 20 years, and with the enlargement of the metropolitan territory to 17 councils, new singularities and emerging tensions are added. The balance between continuities and polarizations of tourist practices constitutes one of the theoretical and empirical challenges of our qualitative research.