Ecotourism Experiences

Mountain tourism has been a banner of local development that this paper has addressed as a research problem around the experience and meaning involved, but unlike the marketing or critique of this human activity, the present study rather set out to interpret the discourses and narratives of mystical, anthropocentric and ecocentric evocations in order to deepen understanding of what appears to be a juncture of past and future in the present, known as symbolic processualism. An exploratory, cross-sectional, interpretative and retrospective study was carried out with a purposive selection of participants and informants. Lines of research concerning the figurative and historical core of social representations are evident, as not only a distinction between experiences and discourses, evocations and narratives is ethnographically recognised, but also a collective construction of the meaning of the mountain based on the opportunities and capacities of access.