Sustainable Mountain Development - Mountain Geography: Physical and Human Dimensions - page 612

While tourism has roots in pilgrimage, a centuries-old phenomenon that is still import-
ant in many mountain areas, the rapid growth of tourism as an important element in the
economy of many mountain areas derives from a number of linked factors. These relate
to increased urbanization, discretionary time and income, and mobility; the need of an
increasingly urban population to escape from cities for spiritual and recreational needs;
and tremendous increases in accessibility to mountain areas. Many roads built for other
reasons, such as the extraction of natural resources or military purposes, have also led
to increases in tourism; other roads—to ski areas, for example—have been built mainly
for this purpose. Railroads opened up the English Lake District and certain valleys in
the Alps, the Rocky Mountains, and the Indian Himalaya from the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury on; in the twentieth century, the “bullet train” system linked Japan's major cities to
tourist destinations in the mountains. The real costs of international air travel have de-
creased and, within countries, small airlines and helicopters make it possible to reach
almost any mountain area.
Tourism is regarded by many governments and communities in mountain areas
around the world as vital for economic development and survival. Yet its distribution is
very uneven within any given mountain region, and its benefits tend to be spread very
unevenly at every scale, from the national to the local. At the scale of communities, the
apparent benefits of tourism in terms of maintaining populations are shown by statist-
ics from the Alps, which generate nearly 50 billion euros in annual turnover, about 8
percent of the annual global tourism turnover (Fig. 12.7). While tourism provides 10-12
percent of the jobs in the Alps, tourism-related activities are concentrated in only 10
percent of the communities. Generally, these communities have stable or growing pop-
ulations, while other communities are losing population (Permanent Secretariat of the
Alpine Convention 2011). Yet even in this global center of tourism, demand is not reli-
able; in the 1990s, there was a significant decrease in the number of overnight stays,
although numbers recovered, particularly in the Austrian and Italian Alps (Macchiavelli
2009). Tourism is also highly sensitive to real and perceived risks to personal safety, as
seen in the mountains of Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Kashmir, Nepal (Bhattarai et al. 2005),
Pakistan, Rwanda, and Yemen in recent years.