Resumen de The importance of assessing the aesthetic quality of the cultural landscape

Maria Margarida Custódio Santos, Ana Maria Ferreira, Carlos Costa

• A more in-depth look at what is generally termed environmental impact shows that, in many cases, what we are really talking about are not environmental impacts, but rather considerable changes in the aesthetic quality of the destination’s cultural landscape. In this regard, the goal of our work is to help create a methodology that will enable us objectively to assess the changes which have taken place in the aesthetic quality of the cultural landscape to ensure proper management of the cultural landscape and thus prevent the destination entering into decline. In the absence of specific indicators for assessing the change in the aesthetic quality of tourism destinations, a first approach was to test in the context of a mature tourism destination operational landscape indicators of visual quality identified in the perspective of rural landscapes.