Oradea Metropolitan Area as a Space of Interspecific Relations Triggered by Physical and Potential Tourist Activities

Abstract

Metropolitan areas provide many opportunities to spend quality outdoor leisure time as well as to discover many cultural attractions. Sprawl occurs in Romania quite rapidly, encouraged by the construction of ring roads around many cities and their expansion into metropolitan areas. The current paper aims to identify metropolitan tourism models based on which tourist flows can be sustainably reoriented within rural Oradea Metropolitan Area (OMA) given their the tourist potential level (i.e., very low, low, average, high). The tourist potential was scaled based on the Methodology for the Analysis of a Territory’s Tourist Potential, which stands as a law published in the Official Monitor of the 14th of June 2016. The study indicates that most tourist activity develops in the OMA southern part in Sânmartin commune, thus unsustainably capturing all tourist flows of the rural OMA. Natural and man-made tourist attractions’ territorial concentrations were emphasized in the communes from the south and northern OMA, but there are major territorial dysfunctions in terms of technical endowment and tourist infrastructure supply. The three emerged models refer to the medical–recreational and eco–residential wellness network, discovery eco-holiday, and co-visit and marginal community.