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Isabel Durán-Muñoz and Eva Lucía Jiménez-Navarro 3
Hikma 23 (Número especial I) (2024), 1 - 22
Ecotourism Society as “responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the
environment, sustains the well-being of the local people, and involves
interpretation and education” (TIES, 2023, “The Definition”), while nature
tourism refers to “actividades recreativas y de esparcimiento en la naturaleza
sin degradarla” (Ministerio de Agricultura y Pesca, Alimentación y
Medioambiente, 2017, p. 2). In other words, both are sustainable types of
tourism and take place in nature, but their purpose is slightly different despite
being often used as synonyms. Something similar happens with adventure
tourism, which is the segment under study in the current paper, since it is
frequently confused with other types of alternative tourism, like nature tourism
or active tourism.
This type of tourism “is one of the most rapidly growing sectors in the
world,” according to the Global Report on Adventure Tourism (WTO, 2014,
p. 10), and consists in the practice of adventure activities such as climbing,
rafting, or canyoning, which take place in the nature with greater or lesser
intensity and risk. In this context, both from physically well-prepared to
completely unexperienced tourists can practise adventure activities adapted
to their level and their preferences. This entails from less physically
demanding activities, such as cycling or hiking, to highly demanding and risky
experiences, like bungee jumping, white-water rafting, or skydiving.
To date, no agreed definition of adventure tourism exists, although in
general most experts recognise that it entails the following features: danger,
risk, challenge, novelty, excitement, exploration, and discovery. As a way of
example, the Adventure Travel Trade Association (ATTA; 2024a) considers
that adventure tourism “contains three main components […]: 1) physical
activity, 2) a connection to nature and the environment and 3) an immersive
cultural experience” (“Values Statement,” par. 2). It complements this
definition by adding that “Adventure travel isn’t just about adrenaline, distance,
or physical challenge. Adventure travelers are seeking to learn about history
and culture, to immerse themselves in nature, and to engage deeply with your
destination” (ATTA, 2024b, “What is Adventure Travel?”, par. 1). To
summarise, adventure tourists play an active role in these activities with a high
degree of involvement, demand a real adventure experience in nature, and
search for certain elements of risk.
Based on the main features of this type of tourism, the initial hypothesis
of this work suggests the idea that the use of the main keywords defining
adventure tourism are the same in both English and Spanish. Having said
that, the objectives of this paper are twofold: on the one hand, to carry out a
corpus-based study of the nominal keywords that define this type of tourism
according to most of the definitions found so far (cf. Section 3.2.), that is,
adventure, nature, and risk (and their adjectival forms adventurous, natural,