Scientific importance in the selection of heritage tourist attractions. A vision from social spatiality

Abstract

Visitor attractions are a reflection of a dissimilar valuation on certain resources and places. In order to understand their configuration from a social spatiality perspective, the study focussed on the “nucleus” of heritage geosites through the exploration of the concept or scientific importance, in palaeontological geosites from the North Patagonia region, Argentina. It was conducted an exploration of secondary sources, the social and symbolic analysis was based on five study cases; and finally, trough an intentional sample it was collected different opinions of Argentinian researchers that belonged to the geo-palaeontological scientific community. The results showed that scientific importance can be defined with several indicators and it is a difficult criteria for a tourist valuation methodology of palaeontological geosites. The contribution of this work to Geography is to discuss the theoretical and methodological foundations, which lie below the criteria for selecting visitor attractions, based on natural heritage.