Innovation and Tourism: Between Territorial Reproduction and Sustainable Development

Abstract

The Ourika Valley, located less than an hour from the red city of Marrakech, is now experiencing various and rapid environmental, demographic, socio-cultural, economic changes, etc. These changes also affect traditional productive systems and the local way of life.Its authentic and unspoiled places, with a good reputation and a wealth of therapeutic processes and treatments based on natural products and medicinal plants in a territory. This strong potential at the level of products and resources linked to well-being tourism, until now not well exploited, and omitted on the part of those responsible for tourism, it constitutes a good ground to exploit in order to implement this type. Tourism, thus strongly contributing to the diversification of the tourism product and offer on offer.

Indeed, the projects of the tourist gardens of Ourika, present an innovative tourist product in the valley, thanks to the valorization and the mobilization of the aromatic and medicinal plants, which are finalized in the laboratories of the gardens of natural cosmetic products. Thus, authenticity and specificity can become a support for the creation of wealth and territorial innovation, through the diversification of the tourist offer.

This is not just a new tourist product, but it is about trying to understand how to structure local initiatives and mobilization processes around the promotion of a heritage collective heritage and territorial order around a mountain territory?