Resilient and regenerative Rural Tourism: the case of Travancinha Village, Portugal

Abstract

In the recent past, Portugal has suffered from devastating rural fires, particularly in its hinterland regions, with current data on climate change suggesting an increasing risk. This risk jeopardizes these regions’ living conditions, while simultaneously deterring visitors. Still, particularly small-scale, locally embedded rural tourism projects may also help introduce changes in regional landscape management and enhance community resilience. The main goal of this study is to a) analyze the importance of prevention in addressing the challenges imposed by climate change in low-density territories, specifically associated to rural fires in the inland of Portugal, and b) explore how rural tourism can contribute to the resilience and regeneration of the destination after fire-incidents. Based on a qualitative study using a constructive-interpretive case study, namely that of Travancinha village (Municipality of Seia, in Portugal’s Central Region), semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with local tourism agents, local authorities, and tourism development agents and subjected to content-analysis. Also, documents and secondary data were analysed, namely statistics and policy documents regarding measures of climate change risk prevention, combat, and mitigation. Based on this, an analysis was performed regarding the pre- and post-fire periods of 2017 and 2022. The results reveal the importance of community collaboration in rural and low-density territories, in the analyzed case, and a model of regenerative tourism, based on community resilience, is proposed. Some conditioning factors for the success of this model are also identified. munidade.