There is certainly a complex and long-standing relationship between World Heritage and tourism. As tourism is mentioned only once among the 38 articles of the 1972 “Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage” (UNESCO 1972), this has been very true in the daily practice of site management. as well as for a long time. which underpins how World Heritage sites are perceived, encountered and experienced within broader social and political perspectives. Over 40 years and counting since the Convention, the consideration of tourism as an active variable in the production and consumption of World Heritage has moved from implicit to increasingly explicit in policy and practice. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get an original essay There are of course many sites on the World Heritage List in India and abroad which for tourism are important not only for reasons of protection, daily management, or problems of physical and perceptual access, do not attract a significant number of tourists. Designation of World Heritage status may fall to sites, particularly urban sites, that already experience some degree of tourism activity. However, it's hard to think of World Heritage sites without imagining swarms of tourists taking photos, lines of parked tour buses and souvenir stands, etc. Any type of tourist who arrives at a World Heritage site is confronted with the realities of tourism. ; a significant number of tourists as well as a service sector that has grown in scale and scope to meet the needs of the temporary but recurring tourist population. Beyond the sign of long-term attrition of the physical fabric and waste, there might be immediately visible markers of tourist excess. The negative impact of tourism tends to be cumulative and hidden, revealing itself in more subtle ways through price inflation, community displacement and acculturation. The process of infrastructure development associated with tourism development is more direct and visible and, although not necessarily within the boundaries of World Heritage sites, it has been argued that it can have an impact on the quality of the site (Leask and Fyall 2006)[72]. In the tourism literature, considerable attention has been given to studies that illustrate the problems that tourism can and does pose to the physical fabric of cultural and natural heritage sites and to the socio-cultural well-being of neighboring local communities. This type of tourism studies has nourished and is fueled by a pervasive discourse suggesting that tourism constitutes a de facto threat to world heritage. However assessed, measured and managed, the impacts of tourism may raise broader geopolitical questions regarding the category of World Heritage sites itself and whether there is indeed some degree of causality between the designation of the site and its ability to attract tourists. “World heritage is not homogeneous and its management is not monolithic” (Bourdeau, Gravari-barbas and Robinson 2011; Di Giovine 2009). They certainly differ considerably in terms of their reputation, the scale of tourism flows around them and the extent to which the state and relevant actors contribute to it (Ashworth and Van der Aa 2006). It is this diversity in the face of the uniformity of production, and a production at the crossroads of the global and the local, which creates an interesting “heritage cape” (Di Giovine 2009) and.