Cultural Tourism in Rural Romania and Community Development: where are we and what are we doing? [2006]

The study on the cultural tourism in rural Romania was an exploratory research and had the purpose to identify to what degree there still is a heritage with tourist potential and which are the structures, institutions or persons capable to develop projects in this respect.

Moreover, we aimed to obtain data that would answer these questions: “how realistic do the projects for the community development through cultural tourism seem?”, “what can be capitalised in the context of such a project?”, “who develops and for what purpose?”

The study comprised 354 cases of heritage objectives from 160 towns, 37 counties respectively.

The results showed that the localities with the highest degree of tourism development are those having nature objectives, unlike those that needed the intervention of the community. Moreover, there are problems related to the infrastructure, services, management and administration. In the end, the study proposed several types of policies and behaviour typologies necessary in the development projects.