Diseño de un inventario de lugares de interés geológico para la gestión del Geoparque Mundial de la UNESCO Montañas do Courel (España)

Abstract

Geoparks should use inventories of geosites to manage their Geological Heritage. This management is mainly focused on the sustainable development of a territory; however, most of the methodologies designed for the elaboration of LIG invento- ries analyse, besides the intrinsic/scientific and didactic/interpretative values, the value regarding touristic/recreative potential (Pereira and Pereira, 2012; Brilha, 2016). However, sometimes this does not identify its actual use. In the study presented here, valuation of the touristic-recreative potential of the selected LIG has been thoroughly analysed through the identification of both their potential and natural uses. This work proposes a new methodology based on previous work optimized for the elaboration of the inventory of geosites of the Courel Mountains UNESCO Global Geopark do. This methodology is based on a panel of experts and on the multidisciplinary database of the Geopark (developed through a Geographic Information System), and includes five main indexes: Natural Value, Scientific Value, Potential Public Use, Actual Use, and Vulnerability-and-Degradation Risk. In turn, the Potential Public Use index includes the indexes of: Visiting-Suitability, Tourism and Educative Promotion, Offer of Services, and Other Interests. The values from indexes are represented by frequency distributions to facilitate their reading and to quantify their evolution over time, especially those parameters related to potential and actual uses.