Human Activity in Landscape Seasonality: The Case of Tourism in Crete

Abstract

As an integral quality of the landscape, seasonality greatly affects, informs and interweaves with human livelihood systems, such as the tourism-based economies of Greek island communities, currently almost entirely dependent upon summer holiday tourism for their survival. The multiple facets and impacts of seasonality produced and inscribed by tourism on the landscape, and specifically on the landscape of northern Crete, are described and discussed. For this purpose, a three-fold analytical framework of tourist resort evolution for a Greek island or rural tourist destination, from the stage of discovery to the stage of establishment and institutionalization of tourism, is employed. The three different stages of this tourism destination lifecycle model are roughly represented by three different zones of tourism impact in the broader region of Hersonissos in northern Crete. Here, tourism-induced changes roughly attenuate with distance from the coast, acquiring distinctive geographical patterns that follow those of spatial tourist concentration, scale of development, and incorporation of tourism into Cretan society and space. It is illustrated that the role and impact of tourism-induced seasonality seems to be most pronounced and significant during the second stage of the lifecycle of a tourism area such as the Cretan region under study.