Sustainable Tourism Law

452 SUSTAINABLE TOURISM LAW The municipality is located entirely in the natural park of Southwest Alentejo and Costa Vicentina. Therefore, land use in the territory is subject to strong environmental conditionings by Portuguese legislation, namely the regulation plan of the natural park, according to which municipal plans of territorial land use must comply, and the coastal zone planning. Consequently, the beaches where tourist and recreational movements occur, including surfing, must obey regulations and competencies of different maritime and environmental governmental authorities. For example, the regional harbourmaster (e. g edict no. 3/2017, dated 02.02.2017 and published on the internet in http://www. amn.pt/DGAM/Capitanias/Lagos/Lists/Documentos_AMN/EDITAL%20 003-2017.pdf ) classifies the beaches and defines the criteria for granting licenses to surfing schools, the number of licenses given and the rules for their use. Additionally, there is also a responsibility attributed to a national environmental entity, the Institute for the Conservation of Nature and Forestry. It is tasked with drawing up, within the regulatory framework of the natural park of the Southwest Alentejo and Costa Vicentina, a nature sport charter. This charter is supposed to define the places for the practice of sports activities (e.g. surfing), as well as the criteria for their proper execution to safeguard the densities of use, recreational carrying capacity and compatibility between the activities and the nature conservation aims (art. 52 nr. 1 and art. 81 nr. 3 of Regulation Plan n.º 11/2011 published in the PRD (Portugal Republic Diary) on 04.02.2011). Since this charter has not materialized yet, problems of institutional emptiness and lack of rules in territorial tourism governance exist. Surfing tourism has grown steadily in the last decades (Buckley, 2002; Gonçalves, Mascarenhas, Sandro, & Pereira, 2013; Ponting & O´Brien, 2013) and is viewed as a potential source of development by communities and destinations around the globe (Martin & Assenov, 2014; Towner & Milne, 2017). However, the growth of commercial surfing activities, when unregulated, can have detrimental social and environmental impacts for communities, alongside minor economic gains (Buckley, 2002; Ponting & O´Brien, 2013). Despite the economic benefits observed in those regions, various unfavourable environmental (e.g., pollution, damage of natural resources) and socio-cultural consequences (e.g., crowding, increase of social problems such as drugs, alcohol and prostitution, loss of cultural identity) of tourist activities put the territories under increasing pressure (Ponting, McDonald, &Wearing, 2005;Towner &Milne, 2017). Surfing is acknowledged as a tourism product that can contribute substantially to the local economic development. Nevertheless, local leaders,