The Tourism Resources of Transylvania in the Context of Sustainable Development

Abstract

We are talking about Transylvania as an ex-province of Romania and a current geographical and historical region which encompasses maximum 10 counties: Alba, Bistrița, Brașov, Cluj, Covasna, Mureș, Harghita, Hunedoara, Sălaj, Sibiu. Because of the multitude and variety of tourist resources, complementarity stands out as a specific attribute of the tourist attractiveness of this multicultural region, which bear the mark of the 3 great cohabitant ethnic groups: Romanians, Hungarians and Germans. The natural tourist resources assure the background for the anthropic ones. A sustainable and unitary development of Transylvania for tourism could not be carried out without an enterprise of shaping a new and unique destination image, prior to the development itself, according to the mental individualisation through geographical and historic landmarks and based on the natural and anthropic tourism resources of the area. As a conceptual frameworks for this paper, we specify the geography and tourism literature.