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Residential tourism and municipal land use planning in Portugal

Development policies for Portugal, both territorial and sectoral, have been giving increasing importance to the phenomenon of residential tourism. However, this concept in Portugal is neither clear nor sufficiently evident, both in the legislation that regulates the tourism sector and in research, as well as in the political or technical discourses that address this phenomenon. Bearing in mind what can be extracted from the official documents, as well as the declarations of policy makers of the sector, residential tourism in Portugal is understood as a tourist package that joins two main components: 1) the real estate development of second homes ; 2) its complement with a more or less diversified range of support services, which may include, among others, conventional hotels and golf or other activities related to tourism animation ; being the expected result of these two investment vectors the loyalty and increase of the periods of stay, with eventual reduction of seasonality, of larger numbers of tourists that already make up the main market flows to Portugal. However, since 1969 there has been at least the possibility of marketing second homes within the framework of other "tourist accommodation" types, such as tourism villas, tourism villages and resorts. Thus, what may explain this "new awakening" for this type of tourism real estate and, on the other hand, how to understand its non-dissemination through vast portions of Portuguese territory. A part of the answer to this question can be found in the planning system that since the end of the 1970s has been guiding the occupation of the territory in Portugal. On the one hand, there is close supervision over the definition of the perimeter of urban settlements and, on the other hand, the construction outside these very same perimeters is not completely excluded, taking into account, for example, the argument of the necessity of tourism development. Because of this, more or less extensive areas of municipal territory where specific environmental amenities are verified can be reserved in municipal plans for tourism use. However, it is clear throughout the Portuguese territorial planning process that any constructive development, unless it is in the public interest, can not collide with the values of the natural environment to be preserved (National Ecological Reserve ; Natura 2000, or Special Protection Areas resulting other Community directives). In this way, it can be foreseen a conflictuality of interests between, on the one hand, the state policies of containment of urbanization that also try to protect the primary tourist resources that today put Portugal at a high quality level as a destination, and the desire, on the part of the promoters, of investment multiplication, where the real estate promotion component may be the best and most quickly remunerated. This communication is a contribution to the clarification of the problem of the expansion of second homes (without any control) and, correspondingly, the so-called (heavily scrutinized) residential tourism in Portugal.

residential tourism ; second homes ; tourism development ; territorial development ; territorial planning

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