Does regional potential match real visitor flows in a rural wine terroir? Exploring the Bairrada wine region
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Purpose – Wine tourism has increasingly been identified as ‘terroir tourism’ (Holland et al., 2014;
Kastenholz et al., 2021, characterized by multi-motivational exploration of wine producing territories,
where the enjoyment of landscape, nature and cultural attractions are as important as the
opportunity to taste and learn about wine and its production. However, little is known about the
movements of visitors within wine regions and the role of wineries, nature and cultural attractions in
determining such movements, nor that of regional promotion.
This paper has three main purposes, namely the assessment of 1) regional tourism potential
associated to relevant existing resources as well as their integration in suggested visitor itineraries, 2)
the visitor movements in the same territory and 3) correspondence/ distance between the regional
‘honeypots’ and real visitor movements, using the Bairrada wine region as a case study.
Design/Methodology/Approach - To achieve the above-mentioned purpose, firstly the main cultural
and natural resources, the vineyard areas and the wine cellars of the Bairrada wine region were
mapped via Geographical Information Systems. Additionally, visitor itineraries, as suggested by the
Wine Route Association on their webpage, are integrated in these maps to show the
recommendations of territorial exploration as presented by this entity. These steps will help identify
sub-regional clusters of potential visitor interest and their spatial organization. Concretely, thematic
maps were created to display geographical information about the region in order to understand which
are the most important wine areas (in terms of number of producers and the vineyard area) and also
to understand the location of the Bairrada Route POI and their connection via suggested itineraries. A
survey-complemented exploratory tracking exercise (using GPS) permits the realtime tracking of
visitor movements in the region, resulting in data that will finally be integrated in the system and
compared to the before identified attraction clusters and suggested itineraries in the Bairrada wine
region. Findings - The spatial analysis allowed to understand how the main natural and cultural attractions are
distributed in the Bairrada demarcated region, as well as the spatial distribution of the vineyards area
in this region.
Through the exploratory GPS study, the routes taken by respondents in this territorial space were
evaluated, and this geographic information was linked to the attractions present in that same region.
Based on the analysis undertaken, it is not possible to conclude which are the main determinants in
visitors’ travel to the Bairrada region. According to the exploratory tracking exercise, there is no clear
connection between the tracks and the existing attractions, nor with the suggested itineraries.
Research limitations/implications – Despite the itineraries presented on the wine route’s website and
the presence of a series of attraction clusters, visitors participating in the tracking study presented a
relatively limited special exploration pattern. This result may be linked to poor/ ineffective
dissemination of the itineraries and regional attractions.
Thus, it is important to create dissemination strategies that can attract visitors and promote an
effective knowledge of the region and its attractions. GIS can contribute to achieve these results, as
tools to represent and identify the tourist attractions of the regions, contributing to better planning
and decision-making in terms of tourism. Furthermore, the use of GIS as tools for analysing and
discussing the spatial distribution of attractions also contributes to the development of tourism
marketing strategies (Albuquerque et al., 2018), namely through powerful information processing,
spatial analysis and data visualisation (Zhang et al., 2021).
The main limitations of the research was the small sample of the exploratory study, conditioned by the
covid-pandemic, which may have contributed to a bias in the results.
