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.
Appreciating loess landscapes through history: the basis of modern loess geotourism in the Vojvodina region of North Serbia
-
Published:January 01, 2016
-
CiteCitation
Djordjije A. Vasiljević, Slobodan B. Marković, Miroslav D. Vujičić, 2016. "Appreciating loess landscapes through history: the basis of modern loess geotourism in the Vojvodina region of North Serbia", Appreciating Physical Landscapes: Three Hundred Years of Geotourism, T. A. Hose
Download citation file:
- Share
Abstract
Loess is wind-blown sediment that covers extensive areas in the middle latitudes. Much of the loess in Eastern and Central–Eastern Europe has been redeposited by the River Danube and its tributaries. The case study area (Vojvodina region) encompasses the confluence area of the Danube, Sava and Tisa rivers. This region includes the most complete and the thickest loess–palaeosol sequences found in Europe, a valuable record of palaeo-climates over the past two million years only recognized in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Long before then however, several enthusiasts, engineers and travellers recognized and appreciated loess as a significant natural phenomenon. Among them was Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli (1658–1730) who gave the first scientific description of European loess in his outstanding multivolume work Danubius Pannonico Mysicus where he drew and explained notable loess–palaeosol exposures along the Danube River. Many other loess observations were also recorded by a number of international travellers, whose illustrated travelogues (mainly published in the nineteenth century) mentioned and illustrated loess observations along the Danube and its major tributaries. This chapter explores the interplay of scientific loess research and its geo-historical literary aspects as the foundations of modern loess geotourism.
- case studies
- clastic sediments
- Danube River
- education
- Europe
- geologic sites
- historical documents
- history
- landform description
- landscapes
- loess
- natural curiosities
- paleosols
- popular geology
- public awareness
- regional
- sediments
- Serbia
- Southern Europe
- Tisza River
- tourism
- Vojvodina Serbia
- Sava River
- Marsigli, Luigi Ferdinando
- Kohl, Johann Georg
- Paget, John
- Paton, Andrew Archibald
- Jerrold, Walter Copeland
- Kapper, Siegfried