Show Caves of Romania

Meleg, Ioana N.; Robu, Marius; Borda, Daniela; Ghemis, Calin; Mátyási, Ludovic; Lascu, Viorel Traian

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-90747-5_58

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…Many papers have been published dealing with show caves and their management in the world (Cigna et al where caves are mostly used as "sceneries" and not as scientifically interesting "world-aparts". Postcards are courtesy of library "Centro di Documentazione Speleologica F. Anelli", Bologna 2000; Cigna and Burri 2000;Cigna and Forti 2013;Spate and Spate 2013;Cigna 2019), and in different countries, including France (Biot 2006), Australia and China (Crane and Fletcher 2016), China (Cao et al 2017), Brazil (Lobo et al 2008;Lobo and Moretti 2009), Croatia (Bočić et al 2006), Italy (Garofano and Govoni 2012), Romania (Meleg et al 2019), Serbia (Tomić et al 2019), Slovenia (Tičar et al 2018), and the USA (Foster 1999). The worldwide increasing interest of people in visiting show caves has led to the development of this kind of tourism in several countries, also becoming an important economic income, especially for local communities in the proximities of these tourist sites.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Global Perspective on Sustainable Show Cave Tourism

Chiarini

Duckeck²,

Waele

2022

Geoheritage

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Caves are among the most visited geological features in the world, attracting over 70 million people every year in more than 1,200 caves worldwide, and amounting up to 800 million Euros in entrance fees alone. The global business of show caves employs roughly 25,000 people directly (management, guides), and at least 100 times more people if we consider the connected tourist activities (souvenir shops, local transport, travel agencies, restaurants, and bars). It is estimated that the whole show cave business has a global commercial value of roughly 2 billion Euros, a number that is increasing constantly. Show caves are generally fragile ecosystems, and care should be taken in their management to safeguard their value for future generations. The international scientific (speleological) community has issued international guidelines for the sustainable development and management of show caves eight years ago, but their application is still far from being applied globally, especially in developing and least developed countries. Cave tourism is expected to increase, especially in countries where caves are abundant but not yet considered as tourist attractions, and where economic and political instability slow down the development of tourism. There are still a lot of possibilities for the opening of new show caves, especially in countries with low Gross Domestic Income (GDI), but their management needs to be sustainable, so that caves become a means of sustaining local economies, educating people on these fragile geo- and ecosystems, and protecting contemporarily their scientific and cultural heritage for future generations.

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