(TITC) – Culture heritage value is consider to be potential source of tourism development. Local provinces have paid attention to protecting and promoting heritage values and make heritage sites become attractive cultural – tourism products.
Hoi An Ancient Town was recognized as World cultural heritage by UNESCO in 1999. Since then, Quang Nam Province has implemented many investment projects to renovate relics and update the infrastructure, issue policies linking preserving heritage sites and tourism development, restore traditional craft villages, conduct surveys and researches to set up scientific document on culture heritage...
Hoi An Ancient Town has been an attractive tourism destination of international tourists and domestic visitors. They are impressive with the image of ancient and peaceful town with golden painted houses along poetic Hoai river, precious historical relics and warm hospitality local people. In 1999, Hoi An Town welcomed nearly 160,000 arrivals and in 2017, the number reached more than 3.2 million. Tourism establisment are also fast increased with 17 accommodation in 1999 and 540 accommodation in 2017 (including villas, hotel, guesthouse, homestay).
According to statistics, the proportion of economic structure of service - tourism - trade sector in 2017 accounted for 70.1%, income per capita reached 40.9 million VND/person/ year, so that the local people (as heritage owner) have able to preserve and repair relics. Hoi An is considered as a successful practice in preserving heritage and improving the quality of local people live by tourism development.
The success story of Hoi An has affirmed the close link between preserving heritage value and tourism development. Government directly supported the local provinces in restoration and preservation of culture relics under 3 categories including anti-degradation, remaining relics and embellishing relics. In the period of 2016 - 2018, there are 238 relics restored and renovated with a total budget of up to 124.4 billion VND.
Beside that, awareness of people in the protection of relics has been improved remarkably. Through the propaganda, the community has better understood and actively participated in the restoration, renovation and promotion of cultural relics.
At the conference "Protecting and promoting the value of cultural heritage for sustainable tourism development" held at the end of July, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc expressed his impression on the strong increase in number of tourists to heritage sites in recent years. In 2017, World cultural and natural heritage sites has welcomed over 16 million visitors (of which 7 million international visitors), the revenue from sightseeing tickets is over 2,500 billion VND. In particular, many intangible cultural heritage sites have become the highlights of the tourism destination, the Prime Minister said.
The above figure shows the great contribution of the heritage sites in local socio economic development, thereby contributing to creating jobs, improving the community life.