La sostenibilita

The Cinque Terre National Park, from its constitution, set its intervention policy and its guidelines for the development of a model now widely adopted: that of sustainable development. According to the classical definition of the World Tourism Organization (WTO ) defining sustainable tourism, "tourism development that meets the needs of present tourists and host regions while protecting and enhancing at the same time opportunities for the future [...] ".

The Park embraces completely this definition not merely to preserve an area of extraordinary beauty and uniqueness as one of the Cinque Terre, calibrating its action on a continuous improvement of quality of life and sustainable development. Starting from the natural, cultural and landscaspe heritage, the goal is to restore a harmonious balance between nature and human element.

The centrality of the human element in the territory of the Cinque Terre is in fact a distinctive feature of the Park and its constitutive philosophy. This is not to defend nature from an invasive and destructive human action, but to preserve thousands of km of dry stone walls created over centuries by the peoples of the area from the shadows of the weeds and from hydrogeological instability. The ratio is reversed. Nature in the Cinque Terre, free to thrive because of the abandonment of land in the middle of the industrial revolution, has reclaimed a land deeply and man domesticated by farmers whose tools for centuries have dissected the mountain in order to have narrow strips of arable land: “ciàn”,the famous terraces.

Nature is not "natural" in the Cinque Terre. Everything is witness of fatigue, work and desperate efforts, not only the landscape but also culture, culinary traditions, the customs of these lands show this effort. These traces left by local people and deleted by nature require an intervention from nature conservation and recovery in a long-term perspective: this is what the National Park of the Cinque Terre over many years is carrying forward.

The conformation of the territory of the Cinque Terre then requires an extensive recovery and at the same time, respect from the guest who, following a trend of a growth trend every year come to visit the Cinque Terre.

Sustainable development, real backbone of the policy of the Park, has given a series of choices to create a shared interest in development, bringing to life and participating this area that found in its abandonment the cause of major deterioration of landscape, while at the same time managing the process of improvement. Sustainability is not simply an empty word without meaning, but a line to follow and above all a practice to carry out.

Many initiatives taken by the Cinque Terre National Park are part in this context such as the Environmental Quality Label for tourist accommodation, which allows you to have, scattered on the territory, a network of environmentally friendly and at the same time, it is possible to communicate directly with the tourists who stay in the Cinque Terre by making them aware of more detailed information about local environmental issues and actions to be put in place to ensure that their stay on site makes less impact for the environment, or even the introduction of the Cinque Terre Cards, whose proceeds are reinvested to prevent phenomena of hydrogeological collapse or to recover uncultivated lands.