The International Cultural Tourism (ICTC) of ICOMOS just welcomed me to their ranks. ICOMOS is the International Council on Monuments and Sites, the official advisory body to UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre on matters pertaining to cultural heritage. The ICTC committee supports ICOMOS’ mission by supplying it with expertise on tourism to cultural heritage sites.
We combined our annual meeting with a few days of learning about the World Heritage site of the Douro Valley of Portugal while traveling through it. We met with local tourism and governmental development agencies, and at the end of our time provided our recommendations for sustainable tourism development in the region.
The annual meeting and all the informal meetings of the committee were excellent. This is a passionate group of experts, committed to heritage preservation who also understand the inevitability of tourism to heritage destinations and are engaged in the process of balancing the needs of the two. The committee is truly international. Many are heritage architects, others are government planners and regulators of heritage protection of buildings and sites. All are very talented and intelligent.
As a committee, we’re in the process of writing a handbook on communicating heritage to the tourism industry, commissioned by the UNWTO. I’m one of the many who is submitting content for the handbook, which will likely be published late this year.
The meeting’s setting in the Douro Valley was delightful. I was somewhat knowledgeable of it from my days of selling the riverboat experience there with INTRAV, and enjoyed seeing it in person for the first time. The landscape is wonderful; vineyards on steep slopes, heavily terraced, with very limited numbers of visitors. A great place to taste wine and the famous port wine of the region, and to walk and bicycle in a beautiful setting. It struck us all as Provence or Tuscany before discovery.
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