Creative Tourism as a New Challenge to the Development of Destinations: The Portuguese Case Study

Abstract

It is still hard to reach a consensus on the concept of creative tourism even if it emerged in 2000, with Richards and Raymond, as a new segment of tourism that can offer tourists the opportunity of co-creating and developing their creative potential. One of its characteristics is that it is quite open and flexible regarding its adaptation to local context. It can be seen as an evolution and as a new approach to cultural tourism which has reached a stage of massification in several world destinations, being Venice, Barcelona or London perfect examples of this. Authentic experiences and active involvement with the culture and contact with real people is a new challenge for the present decade and it is developing rapidly, mainly in Southern Europe. Until now there was little research on the networks and platforms/institutions dealing with creative tourism, and that is why we have developed an investigation, from 2017 to 2018, concerned with the identification and analysis of the existing practices at an international level. We intended also to evaluate the contribution of Portugal in what regards networks and platforms. This investigation was conducted within the scope of the CREATOUR project: Creative Tourism Destination Development in Small Cities and Rural Areas, funded under the joint activities of the “Portugal 2020 Programme” by COMPETE2020, PORLisboa, PORAlgarve and the Portuguese Foundation for Science, Research and Technology (FCT). This Project is going to be developed until 2020. For that we used qualitative methods focusing on content analysis. There was some research done on Google (web), a database with 20 items was created, as well as an analysis on the initiatives in creative tourism that are being developed worldwide. A deeper analysis was done after analysing the initiatives organised by each institution using interviews to the people in charge of the platforms/institutions. The main results tell us that the majority of the creative initiatives occur in Southern Europe. In Portugal’s case, the initiatives are “creative experiences” and have, in fact, to do with co-creation. This is not the case of other initiatives developed in other countries, where it has come to our knowledge that some of the institutions have more learning experiences than creative ones.