Visitors to ‘the northern playgrounds’: tourists and exploratory science in north Norway
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Published:January 01, 2016
Abstract
This paper outlines some significant visits made to north Norway by geologists and mountaineers from Britain and Ireland from the early to late nineteenth century. These visitors wrote up their travels and climbing experiences in a region in north Norway that was difficult to get to other than by sea: Øksfjordjøkelen and Lyngen. Early travellers revealed the sights of the fjord areas and thereby promoted the region for subsequent travellers. Leopold von Buch’s Travels though Norway and Lapland during the Years 1806, 1807, and 1808 probably prompted J. D. Forbes to visit and produce Norway and Its Glaciers and...
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Contents
Appreciating Physical Landscapes: Three Hundred Years of Geotourism

Geotourism, as a form of sustainable geoheritage tourism, was defined and developed, from the early 1990s, to contextualize modern approaches to geoconservation and physical landscape management. However, its roots lie in the late seventeenth century and the emergence of the Grand Tour and its domestic equivalents in the eighteenth century. Its participants and numerous later travellers and tourists, including geologists and artists, purposefully explored wild landscapes as‘geotourists’.
The written and visual records of their observations underpin the majority of papers within this volume; these papers explore some significant geo-historical themes, organizations, individuals and locations across three centuries, opening with seventeenth century elite travellers and closing with modern landscape tourists. Other papers examine the resources available to those geotourists and explore the geotourism paradigm.
The volume will be of particular interest to Earth scientists, historians of science, tourism specialists and general readers with an interest in landscape history.
GeoRef
- Cenozoic
- Europe
- exploration
- glacial geology
- glaciated terrains
- glaciers
- historical documents
- history
- Holocene
- landform description
- landscapes
- Little Ice Age
- Lyngen Peninsula
- Neoglacial
- Northern Norway
- Norway
- observations
- photography
- publications
- Quaternary
- recreation
- research
- Scandinavia
- surveys
- tourism
- Troms Norway
- upper Holocene
- Western Europe
- Bergsfjord Peninsula
- Oksfjordokelen
- Le Blond, Aubrey