Third International Conference on Tourism & Leisure Studies

Abstract

Globally, coastal and littoral areas host the vast majority of population and socioeconomic activity. Consequently they also have experimented strong environmental pressures and, as a result, ecosystem damages that diminishes their abilities to support long term human development. Mainstream coastal tourism development has contributed one of the most to coastal ecosystem degradation. Recently, littoral ecotourism products and experiences are being promoted as a tool to align tourism with sustainability in the wider framework of coastal areas integrated development strategies. Littoral ecotourism is committed with co-creation of meaningfully valued recreational experiences for visitors, establishing synergic links with traditional coastal activities, giving curs to promote innovative, SME-based entrepreneurship and opening coastal areas to ways of participative, bottom-up, governance. In this paper we present the Project Eco-areas for Sustainable Littoral Tourism to promote coastal ecotourism in the Canary Islands in its theoretical grounds, participative decision making process and indicators-based evaluation system. The paper also depicts the main results obtained so far in the Ecoarea of Las Canteras, an urban and tourist, high biodiversity endowed beach located in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Outcomes show that Ecoarea Project has been crucial in building social awareness on environmental risks, promoting social involvement in local governance, reaching effective ecosystem conservation through social surveillance practices and encouraging consensus creation between different beach-based entrepreneurs.