Estrategias de desarrollo rural a partir de actividades de turismo rural en Rumanía¿Hay lugar para una demanda interna?

Abstract

Rural toursm related activities have been widely regarded as key-tools for rural development, specially in those countries -as Romania and all East European countries- where rural space and production is still a major part of whole economic structure, trying by this way to revitalize declining areas and ensure them possibilities of achieving a sustainable future. At this purpose, rural tourism must be considered like a complex plurality of multi-faced activities, contributing both to growth of other activities in rural areas and to improvement of life quality for local inhabitants, all this as part of an effective rural development integrated system. Due to necessary attraction of foreing currency in order to contribute in solving structural troubles of national economies in these countries, design of quite a lot of rural tourism activities on there has usually focused on international demand. However, and even when this could be perfectly right at a first stage, evidence for other countries shows that long-time maintenance of such activities requires of the existence of a -perhaps not so attractive, but indispensable-intenal market. In this paper, we give first descriptive evidence about existence and characterstics of this domestic-and mostly unexpected-market for rural tourism activities in Romania.