Changes in the Touristic Attractiveness of Wild Forests Due to Forestry Activities? The Case of Romania’s Făgăraş Mountains

Wilderness areas are declining worldwide. A major reason is large-scale forestry activities like logging. At the same time, wilderness offers unique opportunities for recreation in natural and remote environments, enabling communities to gather economic income based on wilderness tourism. An outstanding element of wilderness areas is primary forests. Wilderness is often understood as untouched nature, unchanged by human intervention. For visitors, wilderness resembles a counter-world, enabling them to escape from everyday life. The present study investigates whether forestry activities have an effect on the attractiveness of primary forests for wilderness tourism. This question is answered based on a case study in the Făgăraş Mountains (Southern Carpathians, Romania). The findings show that primary forests are a unique selling point in tourism. Forestry activities are associated with direct (loss of biodiversity) and indirect (change of target group) effects. Forestry activities not only cause changes in forests as a tourism attractor, but also change the attractor’s contexts, by rendering access difficult or by destroying hiking trails. This paper makes theoretical and practical contributions. From a theoretical point of view, it reflects the concept of wilderness tourism and highlights the importance of contexts (i.e., access paths) for the attractiveness of wild forests. From a practical point of view, it highlights the importance of distinguishing various target groups and different degrees of naturalness to maintain a nuanced portfolio of recreational opportunities in wild forests, for example by referring to established management tools like the recreation opportunity spectrum.