Alert for the surplus of the tourist offer in the Port – Observer

The General Direction of Cultural Heritage (DGPC) appealed on Monday to find a way of diversifying the tourist offer in the Historic Center of the Port and thus prevent excessive concentrations in the area, lamenting the low condition of the operators.

in A written response to several questions posed by the Lusa news agency the purpose of the 20 years of the declaration of the Historic Centre of Porto as World Heritage, the DGPC has stressed that "much has been done" over the two decades and that "in a general way the action developed by Porto Vivo, Sociedade de reabilitação Urbana (…), will have been beneficial, although in some cases they had been able to put into question the authenticity of the set."

Want the lack of money want to the contrary are to be understood as "harmful to the preservation of the values of cultural heritage, since in both cases these are values that often come out losers’, meaning by the absence of maintenance, or by "interventions that do not take into account the conservation of the historic city and of its population".

In particular on the issue of tourism in the Historic Centre of Porto, the state entity recalls that "are not only the properties inscribed on the World Heritage list that suffer from this evil, evil that is not in tourism but in that of him do."

"There is a need to diversify the supply to avoid a density unwanted which in nothing favors neither the heritage nor the own tourism, a task that has not found an echo among tour operators", noted the DGPC, before adding that "another serious problem that should be addressed by the municipality is road traffic in the mesh medieval".

THE DGPC emphasised that:

it will be the Managing Entity of the Well [in this case, the Municipal council of Porto] find solutions that allow to transmit to posterity the values that underpinned the registration of this well on the World Heritage list and the State the duty not to allow interventions that in some way do not preserve the values of cultural presence in this collection, and that may call into question the Statement of Universal Value Outstanding which is the foundation of this inscription."

In an opinion article published this Monday in the Public, the mayor of Porto, Rui Moreira, stressed that in the near future will be created, "a first regulation that will allow you to sort the historic shops and avoid being expelled by taking advantage of a change in the law proposed by the Chamber of the Port and whose application has been articulated with the Lisbon".

Also, the anarchy that lives in the sector of tourism transportation has its days numbered, thanks to a regulation that we have discussed publicly and that will decrease the pressure on critical areas of the low", can be read in the text entitled "The historic centre and tourism".

The mayor recognizes that "the great challenge facing the municipality is to ensure that the tourism, regulated and disciplined, contributes to the development of the economic, social and cultural of the city, without affecting its sustainability and without the deface".