NATURE-BASED SUBURBAN LEISURE OPPORTUNITIES WITHIN THE ORADEA METROPOLITAN AREA

Over the past 15 years, the periurban area in the proximity of Oradea has been accredited as a place of great attraction for the urbanites eager to move to the countryside, taking advantage of the natural resources, numerically generous and possessing an ecological quality. On such a background, these urbanites or tourists have come into contact and continue to discover these natural resources from the point of view of their new qualities, namely people motivated to do thematic tourism. This study seeks to know in detail the potential of the 11 communes and their related villages in the Oradea Metropolitan Area (OMA) and what they provide for weekend-type activities or forms of tourism based on discovery and leisure. The researched area has various natural resources, but diversity is configured according to the environment and morpho-hydrography specific for the hilly, plain and hilly-plain contact area relief. The inventory of local resources (8 categories) prone to nature-based tourism is dominated by protected areas, rivers and lakes for fishing, deciduous forests and associated hay fields as well as the hilly relief in the eastern part of the area. The expression of the attractiveness of local nature for leisure tourism is given by the attractiveness index, which at the OMA level is 87.47 points, with an encouraging maximum of 11.67 points (out of a maximum of 25 points). The detail of the distribution and the natural resources attraction weight can be found in the four thematic maps.