Religious and Pilgrimage Tourism as a Special Segment of Mountain Tourism

Mountain and hill sites have played a key role as pilgrimage and religious tourism destinations for thousands of years. Mountain areas with traditional sacred cultural and natural values can particularly benefit from the stimulation of religious tourism, in the forms of improved service supply, employment creation and revenue generation. First, the paper provides an overview of the relationship between religion and tourism, and the role of religious tourism and pilgrimages in the great world religions. In the second part, the authors assess the environmental factors as well as the various scenes and places of religious tourism developed in mountain areas, with special emphasis on meta-spaces and spatial metaphors.