Industrial Mining Tourism Activities

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONThe diversification of local sources of income is considered to be one of the main paths to achieving development in certain spaces which, due to their special, depressed situation, need a means of economic reactivation. Tour-ism can be considered to provide an effective and complementary method of achieving development as it combines local synergies, fosters employment and improves the standard of living of the residents of these zones. There-fore, tourism has become one way of addressing the socio-economic problems faced by rural areas, and some zones have used tourism as a method of miti-gating problems related to industrial decline (Arwell and Llurdes i Coit 1996; Hospers 2002). At the same time, the fact that we are witnessing a change in the behaviour of tourists in recent years, characterised by greater sensitivity to environmental problems and new ways of viewing free time, must be tak-en into consideration. This consumer, increasingly demanding and sophisti-cated, is more educated and enjoys a higher standard of living, factors that favour the development of alternative tourism as a complement to traditional mass tourism (Vargas Sanchez, Plaza-Mejia and Porras-Bueno 2009). Thus we find, amongst the modalities of alternative tourism, industrial tour-ism, or tourism related to an area’s industrial heritage, which involves ex-ploiting the special cultural interest that visitors may have in the tangible and intangible heritage of the phenomenon of industrialisation. And industrial tourism includes what is known as industrial mining tourism, which is linked