THE SUSTAINABILITY OF HERITAGE FROM THE ANALYSIS OF SAFEGUARDING, IMAGE AND TOURIST FUNCTIONALITY

Abstract

The sustainable management of heritage implies recognizing all cultural expressions, not only using them for promotion and commercialization, and it must also be assumed that not all heritage is susceptible to becoming a tourist resource (De la Calle, 2002). Tourism and cultural heritage management are fields of activity structured by diverse conceptual frameworks and with values and beliefs that respond to very different criteria; in order to achieve sustainable management, tourism territories must be valued from the comparison of these two dimensions. We start from the following questions: What is the level of
safeguarding and tourist adequacy of the most outstanding heritage sites? and What is the correspondence between the level of safeguarding of heritage sites and their level of promotion? In order to answer these questions, we use record cards on safeguarding, tourist functionality and institutional programs and interventions in heritage, applied to the Zona Lacustre de Pátzcuaro. Their interpretation helps us to detect tendencies, which invite us to pay more attention to the heritage elements than to the whole promotion system, so that both the latter and the cultural system can be managed in a sustainable manner.