Diversity, flexibility and identity: mechanisms for recycling mature tourist destinations

Abstract

Globalizing dynamic sources are making of tourist destinations, spaces each time more homogeneous, unable to respond to the tourist’s new motivation and to the specific characteristics of the territory and the local landscape. Tourist space has gone through changes, resulting in conurbations without urban structure that require new planning patterns. Despite predictions, which determine a declining process or a post-stagnation, there is a high potential of reconversion of obsolete tourist destinations based on its typological characteristics and its interaction with the territory. The new challenges faced by tourist activity: diversity of tourist resources, travel flexibility and the differentiation of the destination from the rest by enhancing its identity, are methodologically tackled by testing regional tourist dynamics experimented in one of the most paradigmatic cases of tourist coastline development, Majorca island.