Evaluating Local Attractiveness for Tourism and Recreation—A Case Study of the Communes in Brzeski County, Poland

For many regions and communes, the development of tourism offers opportunities for economic revival, the stimulation of local entrepreneurship and, as a result, increased budget revenues. Before such objectives can be successfully pursued, however, it is necessary to carefully consider to what degree the conditions present in a particular area are conducive to the development of tourism there, including its tourism resources and the existing state of development. This study analyzes the attractiveness of the seven communes making up Brzeski County (Lesser Poland Voivodeship, Poland) for tourism and recreation. The potential of the communes in this largely rural county was characterized using Gołembski’s index, based on multivariate comparative analysis, assessing the natural and man-made features and the degree of development of each of the communes. This analysis was further complemented using Wejchert’s impression curve, assessing visual attractiveness along selected routes in two of the communes. Of the seven communes analyzed, the Commune of Brzesko was found to have the most extensively developed services, hotel and food-service infrastructure, to be home to many historic buildings and to have a relatively high municipal budget. The Commune of Iwkowa, in turn, which scored lowest in terms of Gołembski’s index (mainly due to its underdeveloped infrastructure, few historic buildings and the fact that it is crossed by a major transit route), was nevertheless found to score significantly higher than Brzesko in terms of Wejchert’s impression curve. These findings confirm that the beauty of the landscape is not always well correlated with tourism development potential. We conclude that such a combination of methods should to be applied to reliably and comprehensively evaluate the relative attractiveness of different parts of a given region for tourism and recreation, for instance so as to inform planning decisions and the allocation of funding.