The classified heritage in Portugal can generate twice as many visitors and triple the ticket revenue, concludes a study released today on the economic and social value of the sector.
Entitled “Cultural Heritage Study in Portugal: Assessment of Economic and Social Value”, it was carried out between 2018 and 2019 by a team composed by Catarina Valença Gonçalves, director of Spira, a private company in the area of cultural heritage, José Maria Lobo de Carvalho, director from the Observatório do Património, and José Tavares, professor at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa – School of Business and Economics, and financed by the Millennium bcp Foundation.
The study – published today by the authors in an online presentation – is based on a universe of 4,575 classified real estate in the country’s 308 municipalities and also estimates that this heritage could generate full-time employment for every 25,000 visitors / year per each patrimonial unit, increase direct hospitality jobs by 3% and overnight stays by 3.4% per municipality.
Contacted by the Lusa agency about the results of the study and the universe of data on which the researchers were based, Catarina Valença Gonçalves commented that it is a pioneering document in Portugal, where, until today, “there are no statistics for cultural heritage, nor collection policy at national level ”.
The official pointed out “great difficulties” in obtaining data, especially at the local level, because most of them are collected by various entities, such as the Directorate-General for Cultural Heritage, the Regional Directorates for Culture or the Equipment Management and Cultural Animation Company of Lisbon, “but there is no organization that gathers all the data from the country, from all types of classified heritage”.
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