The role of the tourist guide in the context of the conservation and valuation of the tangible and intangible heritage

Abstract

The starting point of this critical reflection is the dominant categorization of tourist guide in Portugal, until deregulation and disqualification in 2011:

"The national guide (and regional guide) is the professional who accompanies tourists on trips and visits to tourist attractions, such as museums, national monuments and palaces, communicating historical and cultural information, whose activity covers all national territory ". In Spain, the formation of guides talk about usually to cultural tourism.

According to this reducing definition, the tradition of schools and the training of tour guides, settled on general directed to the History and History Art, accompanied with the learning of a foreign dominant language, despite some recent curricula include the first references to the "natural heritage".

1. We will review then if vocational training (and qualification) around these two themes (History and Art History) to which they add the specialization in two or three foreign languages, favoring the English, correspond not only to the currently demand, but also to the “taste” of the different layers of the middle class, which constitute the core business of tourism flows. The concept of "taste" includes not only the interest in expanded scientific information, but also aesthetic and moral values (ethics).
2. In this context, will be debated if the dissemination of multimedia information resources can be equivalent to the Guide performances, particularly in direct relationship with the diversification and expansion of tourism categories (types), Cultural Tourism, Tourism of Nature and Rural Tourism, integrating the new paradigm of Environmental Tourism.
3. We will examine in parallel the problems of tourism communication, from the Greek concept of "pedagogue" and inquiring the relationship of tourism communication with the disciplines of Theatre (and the media) and Rhetoric.
4. Looking for new courses of formation and activity to the guides, we will attempt to systematize not only the guide profile corresponding to the emergence of a new paradigm, the environmental tourism (environment is nature more culture), but also to establish a open pathway to diverse scientific training, encompassing not just science and technology, but also all the scenic arts, the performing arts, sciences of communication, in conjunction with aesthetics and the new environmental ethics.