Percepção ecoturística : uma contribuição ao desenvolvimento local do ecoturismo da região serrana do município de Venâncio Aires, RS-Brasil.

Abstract

The mountain region of Venâncio Aires, RS, has its main production based on tobacco. Besides rural evasion, the possibility of developing other agricultural activities is not favored due to its steep topography. Despite some interventions to trigger a process of organization and training in Ecotourism, this region is still stagnant concerning this activity. Thus, in order to understand this process, this investigation has sought information on what is the residents’ perception level regarding the Ecotourism development and their attitude related to environmental issues. Thus, the hypothesis on the mountain region of Venâncio Aires, RS residents’ perception level was determined, it is consistent with the activities developed by Ecotourism. Consequently, the project aimed to confirm the residents’ perception level of the region of the study, to verify whether this perception level would be consistent in order to implement Ecotourism activities and what aspects cooperate or make the development of Ecotourism impossible in the region. For the development of procedures for determination of the residents’ perception level, the residents were visited for interviews at their homes. Since there is no information on the region residents’ ecotourism perception level, and the term “ecotourism perception” is innovative for this project, a formulary was built based on studies of environmental perception developed for several projects of environmental basis, which was named Ecotourism Perception Formulary – FPE. The collection of data was voluntary by using the non disguised communication method, where FPE was employed to a sample number of 108 residents. The collected data were analyzed and calculated with software SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science) and EXCEL (Microsoft Office Excel). For this sample, analyzing the issues that determine the ecotourism perception, a percentage of 84,259% of right answers (benefit positive relation to Ecotourism) was found, this number refers to Ecotourism Perception. This number validates the hypothesis and shows that the residents have habits and behavior consistent with the principles of Ecotourism. Thus, it is understood that “Ecotourism Perception” may appoint trends, habits and particular behavior on this topic, it may also appoint new alternatives for the region development and for the construction of new product chains and services linked to Ecotourism.