Analysis of circular tourism as a tool for the recovery after Covid19.
About this good practice
With more than 2.600 million euros of GDP, tourism is a sector that involves 7% of Castilla-La Mancha GDP and 57.000 direct jobs. Due to Covid19, 54% of hotel overnight stays and 35% of rural overnight stays were lost. This is a sector that also involves high local impacts producing negative externalities and could stimulate circular flows to reconcile tourism with sustainable management of resources.
Making a diagnosis of the situation of tourism sector in our 5 provinces was the start point that ended up with the development of 2 Circular Tourism zones per province.
On the diagnosis process were used indicators such as: target subsectors, indirect beneficiary sectors, depopulation level, number of visitors, high value natural & cultural elements, etc.
With all this, was calculated the territorial potential for implementing circular tourism projects. The results were presented on each province: Cuenca (4 projects, 42 actions), Ciudad Real (3 projects, 21 actions), Guadalajara (12 projects), Toledo (10 actions) and Albacete (16 projects).
And after that a call for grants was published on May through Order 100/2022, which establishes the regulatory bases for the implementation of circular economy projects in the field of tourism sector.
The organisation that promotes the initiative is Circular Economy Directorate-General; the beneficiaries are the enterprises of the areas (benefited directly from grants), and indirectly local authorities due to the benefits from the whole sector.
Resources needed
The amount of financial resources used for the diagnosis process in the region was 83.600 € and the call for grants amounts to 280.000 € divided in a maximum of 55.000 € per beneficiary with a month to submit their applications and the maximum period for executing the actions is 12 months.
Evidence of success
After diagnosis, analysing and public participation, outputs were 45 pilot projects in our region and 73 concreted actions distributed in the provinces. And also, the development of indicators that evaluate the potential of each territory for the implementation of pilot projects.
Also could be considered as a successful result the first call for grants in the circular tourism area to implement those projects through enterprises indirectly benefiting municipalities and local economy.
Potential for learning or transfer
It could be an interesting start point for other regions with geographic similarities and population distribution that have had the same problems on decreasing of tourists and GDP decreasing related with tourism due to pandemic situation.
The diagnosis is the first step and also the critical one, for identifying and having concrete conclusions on where to start the implementation of Circular Tourism projects in different areas.
The kind of actions and initiatives resulted of the diagnosis may be scalable for other regions.
Further information
Website
Good practice owner
You can contact the good practice owner below for more detailed information.
Regional Government of Castilla-La Mancha