Regional development: redefining tourism through musical events

Abstract

ABSTRACTHow to redefine tourism development from a holistic regional perspective? On Costa Brava (Spain), known as a sun and beach destination, alternative strategies are being explored to strengthen territorial resilience through the promotion of existing products, such as music festivals. A mixed methods research based on the qualitative analysis of interviews with key informants and the quantitative analysis of a battery of indicators will provide the necessary information to analyse the potential of these festivals in a context where the dependence towards tourism and the nature of the tourism model itself are being contested. Lessons learnt from last decade might contribute to a more adequate tourism development in the future.KEYWORDS: Adaptive cycleclusterfestivalsresiliencesystemic analysis AcknowledgementsWe would like to thank the reviewers for their thoughtful comments which have greatly contributed to improve our paper.This work was supported by the MCIN-AEI/10.13039/501100011033 under Grant PID2020-114186RB-C21 and Grant CSO2016-74861-R.Disclosure statementThe authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.Notes1. The collected data belongs to a project granted in 2016 by the Spanish Research Agency, prior to the current ethics protocols that require written consent from participants. The informants gave oral consent as was required at the time in Spain. All the data obtained from the informants has been anonymized and only their professional profile has been used to identify the answers quoted in this paper.Additional informationFundingThe work was supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación [PID2020-114186RB-C21]; Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación [CSO2016-74861-R].Notes on contributorsInmaculada Diaz-SoriaInmaculada Diaz-Soria is a geographer and lecturer at the Department of Geography and at the Tourism School at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain). She is a member of the TUDISTAR research group (Tourism and socio-territorial dynamics) in which she has participated in several research projects. Her research and teaching interests include a critical perspective in tourism, proximity and localization, tourism in the socioecological transition, nature and culture, territorial planning and gender issues.Asunción Blanco-RomeroAsunción Blanco-Romero is a geographer and tenured professor at the Department of Geography at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain). She is a member of the TUDISTAR research group (Tourism and socio-territorial dynamics) in which she has participated in several research projects. She has been president of the “Tourism, leisure and recreation” working group of the Spanish Geography Association. She is also the editor or the scientific journal DAG (Documents d’Anàlisi Geogràfica). Her research and teaching interests include resilience tourism and local development, globalization and sustainability degrowth strategies, territorial planning, geographic and gender issues in cooperative development, and critical perspective in tourism studies.