Castillo Manzano, José I.Castro Nuño, MercedesLópez Valpuesta, LourdesZarzoso, Álvaro2022-08-162022-08-162021Castillo Manzano, J.I., Castro Nuño, M., López Valpuesta, L. y Zarzoso, Á. (2021). Assessing the tourism attractiveness of World Heritage Sites: the case of Spain. Journal of Cultural Heritage, 48, 305-311.1296-2074https://hdl.handle.net/11441/136214No consensus has been reached on the effectiveness of World Heritage Sites (WHSs) in attracting tourism. This paper analyzes the impact of WHSs on tourist demand in Spain at a disaggregated level for all Spanish provinces (NUTS-3 regions), based on original panel data for 50 Spanish provinces for the 2000–2019 period. The results show a positive impact of WHSs on domestic and foreign tourism demand when considering all the provinces together and that the first WHSs (designated in the 1980s) have a greater tourism-enhancing effect (“first generation effect”). However, there are differences between Spanish inland and coastal provinces: only cultural WHSs have an impact on tourism in inland provinces, whereas, in coastal provinces, only natural WHSs have the power of tourism attraction.application/pdf7 p.engAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacionalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Cultural tourismWorld Heritage SitesTourism demandPanel dataSpainNUTS-3 regionsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/articleinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccesshttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.culher.2020.12.005