Journal of Tourism & Hospitality
Open Access

Abstract

Preservation and Conservation of Rural Buildings as a Subject of Cultural Tourism: A Review Concerning the Application of New Technologies and Methodologies

Cano M, Garzón E and Sánchez-Soto PJ

The cataloguing and promotion of rural architecture contribute to creating jobs by stimulating new economic activity, such as the promotion of cultural tourism, while preserving a valuable source of information on rural culture, recovering local construction techniques, encouraging a sense of community, and making villages and rural areas more attractive to visitors.The general aim of the present Review is to analyse agricultural and rural buildings and their properties in order to identify key issues concerning sustainable reutilisation in tourism.
It is intended to Almeria province (Andalucía, Spain) a more complete sustainable tourism development framework to satisfy all the demands, from sun and beach at the coast as well as alternative tourism at the interior, based on the protection and the valuable re-utilization of popular rural architectural heritage with potential interest for tourism purposes. Thus, a catalogue of traditional rural buildings in a particular area was carried out, identifying and characterizing each one, establishing criteria for a dynamic and rational selection.
The modelling of the lifecycle for the architectural project carried out, for the reuse of rural heritage, as a way of stimulating the tourism sector, is based on methods and risk analysis (statistical methods) and multicriteria analysis that allow the reduction in the subjectivity of the deterioration models carried out. Through the application of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), as a weighing method, a linear, weighting and additive model that combines all of the factors in one unique global assessment can be obtained, for which values have been assigned to the coefficients of the linear expression that reflect the relative importance of each factor.