Evolution of the tourist features in El Hierro (Canary Islands)

Abstract

The island of El Hierro, that of minor superficial extension, scarce population and economically linked to the agriculture and the cattle, has had a recent development of the tourist activity. In the course of at most two decades, the Island has gone progressively joining to this new linked economic activity, not to the traditional binomial the sun and beach canary, but to the cultural and hereditary knowledge, the nature and the sport of adventure. The development of recent strategies they seem to leave the model that in the first moment had been the select one (sustainable tourism), approaching progressively other massive tourist products. It is an object of the present work to exhibit how the Island has joined to the general tourist process of the Archipelago and what are the peculiarities that this island takes inside a tourist region as the Canary.