La acción pública reciente en materia de turismo y patrimonio en un destino turístico insular sostenible (La Gomera, Islas Canarias)

Abstract

In a world in which crises occur in short periods of time, tourism must adapt and be resilient in the face of impacts and new challenges. Public agents design measures and strategies to adapt tourism to these changes, from the global to the local level. The aim of this paper is to analyze the recent evolution of public actions related to tourism and heritage in La Gomera, a tourist destination where the first case of COVID-19 in Spain was recorded. This island has a National Park that received more than one million tourists annually before the pandemic, in search of unique landscapes, tranquility and hiking. Today, the number of visitors continues to increase. Documents are presented that encompass policies at different scales, both in terms of tourism and in relation to the configuration and management of the rural and natural environment as a tourist destination. To this end, the documents have been compiled and organized by spatial and temporal scale, and by impact for specific cases. The information from the qualitative content analysis has been compiled in three sheets: one dedicated to the identification of problems/challenges, the assessment of the orientation of the discourse and the types of strategies and measures proposed. In this preliminary phase, evidence is presented of the interaction between tourism and heritage on an island where the tensions between sustainability, tourism development and the valorization and conservation of the island's heritage and the development of the island's cultural and natural heritage are at stake.