Cultural and Religious Routes: a new opportunity for Regional Development

Tourism is growing and the way in which people take their holidays is also changing. Travellers are more aware now of the importance of their free time and are more selective in their choice of holiday: they demand greater value, more experiences and higher levels of quality. The duration of holiday trips is shorter but people are tasking them more frequently over the course of the year. There is also a tendency to organise independent holidays, outside the package deals offered by tour operators. There is a preference for physically and intellectually active holidays, with a growing demand not only for recreational activities, sport and adventure, but also for knowledge of the history, culture and environment of the places being visited. New types of tourism that are more closely linked to culture, nature, health, religion, etc., are growing three times faster than more traditional forms. In the wake of this, numerous thematic tourist routes have been set up, based on food and wine, nature, culture and religion (e.g. the pilgrims' road to Santiago de Compostela, the Via Francigena, etc.). Cultural tourism is one of the most popular and fastest growing sectors, within which religious tourism is growing rapidly, despite being highly complex and fragmentary in its implementation and despite the management issues linked to the various and sometimes incompatible interests that are associated with it. Not the least of these is the highly diversified variety of players, public and private, secular and ecclesiastical, who consider themselves to be responsible for managing the sector and seek to benefit from it. Following a theoretical approach to the concepts of cultural and religious tourism, this paper analyses its features and recent tendencies, stressing its role as an important factor in local development with reference to specific European stories.