Heritage and Cultural Routes: Territorial Development in the Key to Landscape with International Experiences in Spain, Italy, and Argentina

Abstract

This article focuses on three international experiences of territorial development directly linked to heritage and landscape. In particular, it addresses the Senderos de Andalucía, Spain, the enhancement of railway heritage in Italy and the BioComechingones Corridor in Argentina. Each of these experiences presents great differences from each other as regards the theme they develop, the contexts in which they are inserted and their extension both in time and in space, just to name a few among many. However, as a whole they well represent examples of cultural routes. And it is precisely this paradox of being different and also being the same that arouses the interest that justifies this work. In this sense, the aim is to identify common points in the actions, strategies, and policies carried out by each of these experiences, beyond the obvious ones, which allow the conclusion of a manual of good practices, applicable or scalable to other contexts. For this reason, in this descriptive work, a qualitative methodological approach is applied based on the characterization and comparison of the three study cases. Likewise, three shared structuring axes are identified a priori among the three proposals that conceptually frame the work: territorial development, tourism, and landscape. The latter being the main one and focused on the cultural approaches to Landscapes that state that the landscape is a social construction.