L-Tour

Enquadramento

L-TOUR — Tourism Laboratory is one of the applied research laboratories of the Polytechnic University of Tomar. It is based on the Tomar campus and works closely with the School of Management of Tomar (ESGT) and with Techn&Art — Centre for Technology, Restoration and Art Enhancement. Led for several years by Coordinating Professor Luís Mota Figueira, it has been directed by João Tomaz Simões since 2026.

Its mission is to produce useful, critical and context-aware knowledge on tourism, culture, heritage and territorial development, and to put it at the service of concrete decisions by public and private bodies. The laboratory starts from the premise that tourism creates economic and cultural value but also pressure, inequality and risk, and that only systematic measurement can tell these effects apart.

What sets L-TOUR apart

• Primary data, comparable over time: applied projects in degree programmes follow common data-collection protocols, organised in annual waves.
• Outcomes, not just outputs: each piece of work distinguishes what was produced, such as a report or a route, from what the territory now knows or is able to do with it.
• Interdisciplinarity: tourism, regional economics, languages and intercultural communication, literature, documentary film, multimedia, environmental chemistry and applied mathematics.
• Links with teaching: undergraduate, master's and postgraduate students take part in real data collection and analysis, giving the laboratory fieldwork capacity every semester.

Areas of focus

1. Tourism, memory and living heritage: safeguarding, tourism uses and community participation in festivals, rituals and traditional knowledge.
2. Cultural experiences and territorial authenticity: experience design and the training of tourism mediators.
3. Impacts, limits and risks of tourism: tourism pressure, territorial inequalities, cultural commodification and environmental overload.
4. Economics, sustainability and public policy: indicators, flows, visitor profiles, multiplier effects and economic dependence on tourism.
5. Trends, innovation and critical observation: cultural and creative industries, digital technologies and new approaches to destination management.