Traditional Cultural Heritage vs. Film Sceneries: Evaluating the Degree of Sustainability of Cultural Landscapes

Abstract

Cultural tourism is a good way to promote and, consequently, safeguard the cultural heritage of sites. Film tourism is an increasingly demanded form of cultural tourism more focused on the fictional rather than on the authenticity of sites, depriving them from their true identity. This article is proposing a system of indicators of sustainable development in order to evaluate and guarantee long-term sustainability in those sites identified with traditional cultural heritage and where films have been shot. The Historic Centre of Peñíscola, which was declared a Historic-Artistic Site in 1972 and has become film scenery in numerous occasions, has been chosen to be evaluated. The union of a series of film sceneries obtained from the cinema productions that best match the local heritage, through the latter has resulted in a final cultural landscape where the degree of conciliation between them is high. Therefore, the welfare of the host society is in balance with the tourist demands, which makes the Historic Centre of Peñíscola an accurate study case that can contribute to improve a methodology we aim to extrapolate to other tourist destinations threatened by a new uncontrolled mass of tourist.