Painted houses - a genesis for local rural cultural heritage and augmentation of a tourism-based community? A KPA analysis in Ciocănești Commune, Romania

Abstract

Whereas, numerous studies have analyzed cultural objectives with lengthy histories turned into tourism attractions, either in urban or rural settlements, the present research is focused on study the interaction between tourism with the augmentation of local cultural heritage (LCH) based on painted houses after the famous inscribed eggs, internationally known and traditional costumes, in a Romanian mountain village. To this end, the paper examines knowledge, perception and attitude (KPA) of local community in the case of Ciocănești village, located in Northern Romania, using a survey on 171 residents. In order to test our hypothesis, descriptive statistics and stepwise regression method were applied in SPSS v17. The results revealed that the knowledge about local heritage and how it should be preserved and capitalized in the tourism industry are relatively high, but they may be improved for a sustainable tourism development through the augmentation of education and experience acquired in the residence area. While good knowledge influence positively the perception, the gaps between expectations for local heritage impact on tourism development result perception in a negative way. The positive perception generates a protective attitude for the local heritage but less proactive in tourism business. Hence, a real need was raised by locals to receive financial support by EU specific instruments of funding of sustainable tourism. This case study could be an example of augmentation of tourism based on the sustainable action of local heritage conservation for other rural community. In the same time, it reveals the needs for the improvement of heritage tourism management.