Cultural tourism – croatian perspective

Abstract

In modern tourism, the concept of big and mass tourism has been abandoned, and the support has been given to responsible development based on the selected types of tourism. The existing mass and uniform types of tourism are being refined by new and higher quality contents; on the other hand, new types of tourism are also being developed which, thanks to their originality and diversity, enrich its content. In that context, culture has a direct impact on tourism and tourism increasingly affects culture, which has become an important motive for tourist travel. While some 30 years or so years ago cultural tourism implied heritage tourism, that is, visits to cultural and historical monuments, museums and galleries, some 10 years ago that phenomenon underwent its transformation, so that today the same term also implies different cultural and entertainment events and almost all manifestations of living and working cultures. Today, cultural tourism includes tourist travel during which tourists are active participants in the cultural life of the social community they visit, and popular culture represents the part of non-material cultural heritage which forms a new, although often neglected, way of the tourism product diversification. It is our aim to review the general trends in cultural tourism today as well as reveal the realities of the Croatian cultural-tourism product and establish the level of its development within contemporary Croatian tourism.