Inga Tomić-Koludrović

The Older You Are, the More Sustainable You Get

This text is a brief case study of how tourists perceived as “aging” can help sustain the essential qualities of what has recently been described as “living heritage sites”. Its aim is to serve as a relational contextual explanation grounded in one concrete example, which Jack Levin refers to as “sociological snapshots”. This particular snapshot was taken in a well-known heritage center on the Eastern Adriatic coast, inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List as “the historical complex of Split with the Palace of Diocletian” in 1979. Following a brief overview of the development of tourism on the Eastern Adriatic coast, as well as a discussion of specific heritage qualities of the historical core of Split, the results of two comprehensive surveys of tourists visiting the site(carried out in 2005 and 2013) are presented and compared. The discussion of the sociodemographic data and motivations to travel of the types of tourists obtained by means of cluster analysis suggests that experientially-oriented and culturally sensitive tourists aged 50 and over are presently best suited to the purpose of maintaining the heritage qualities of the “living site” in question. The text concludes with questions about how the process is going to develop in the future, when the currently younger visitors, with different educational background, cultural interests, and financial means will also “begin to age”.