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Al-Ahram Weekly 29 July - 4 August 1999 Issue No. 440 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 29 July - 4 August 1999 Issue No. 440
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters Plain talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
Museum International is a UNESCO publication in English, French, Russian and Arabic. Its most recent issue tackles tourism, and how it relates to national heritage.
It contains a number of interesting articles including one -- "Tourism and Conservation: Striking a Balance", by Katheline Perier D Leteren -- that particularly caught my eye.
The article is about safeguarding cultural and natural heritages in the face of ever-growing consumer demands on them. This requires, the writer argues, a new vision of conservation that goes hand in hand with policy directives that must be acted on immediately if irreparable damage is to be avoided. The core of the article is that preventative conservation is better than active conservation -- i.e. that it is better to preserve than to restore and renovate.
In the light of the contemporary emphasis on cultural tourism, which is perceived more favourably than mass tourism, a coherent policy reconciling tourism and the heritage is more urgently needed than ever. There must be a balance, the writer insists, between the needs of tourism -- i.e. between the legitimate national concern to make the most of the heritage as a source of economic benefit, and the need to safeguard that heritage in the broadest sense of the word.
The introduction of sustainable tourism cannot be envisaged without the expansion of appropriate heritage conservation programmes, heritage being an essential factor in the regional, social, economic and cultural development of the country.
Conservation must be thought of as a cultural problem, which means aiming to make the public aware of works of art, monuments and sites and how to treat them.
The writer believes that there should be a policy for the scientific presentation of heritage and that there should be a standardised national training system for tourist guides. Successful experiments in France, Italy and the Egyptian tombs of the kings and queens in Luxor, in which replicas of actual artefacts have been created, are cited in the article as a possible way forward, and it is suggested that focus should be taken away from the most famous sites by drawing attention to lesser know venues, and thus dispersing the inevitable pressures that accrue from numbers. Thousands of sites and historic monuments have been victims of their own success. A massive craze, most of it orchestrated by travel agencies, has led to their being far too many visitors, a situation accepted without second thought by local authorities that have, however, failed to take the necessary protective measures in time.
Too many tourists cannot only physically destroy art, cities, buildings, tourist districts and the environment but can also cause them to lose their symbolic value and compromise historical authenticity. The problem, then, as ever, is to negotiate a compromise between a host of competing demands, and to do so in such a way as to safeguard both the symbolic and physical values of historic sites without unnecessarily restricting access, or exacting an economic cost on local communities, many of which depend upon tourism for their survival.
