The Tourist Role of Relief as Landscape Background

In its relation with tourism, relief fulfils three roles: of attractive resource, of support for tourist infrastructure and activities, and of landscape background, respectively. While the first two undertaken roles are easily identified, in the third case, confusion may appear which is actually aroused by the different manner in which tourists perceive the morphological elements. For some tourists, elements such as Piatra Cetii, Colţii Trascăului or the steep slopes of the Bedeleu represent first-rank tourist objectives, while, for others, they are just the landscape background for other objectives or for tourist activities whose development is not related to their presence. This role appears more clearly in the case of a less spectacular relief, which only frames, from the landscape viewpoint, a tourist resource of prime importance. The study of the relief’s role as landscape background for tourism has high importance in the sense that in any attempt to create a hierarchy of the tourist objectives in the Trascău Mountains, the attractiveness coefficient of the background, of the landscape in which the objective is an integral part, must be taken into consideration.