Perspectives of green pilgrimage tourism in Lithuania
ENRelevance of the topic and scientific problem. There are many types of tourism in the world that allow travellers to gain new experience, get to know new cultures, see exceptional tourist attractions, and more. One such type is green pilgrimage tourism. This is a fairly new, little-known type of tourism that was only started in 2009 with the establishment of the Green Pilgrimage Organization. Green pilgrimage encourages travellers to change behaviours and attitudes towards the environment, take care of nature, re-establish contact with the natural world - both during the journey and when returning home. Participants in this type of tourism are called green pilgrims who respect local culture and the environment. They try to reduce fuel consumption by traveling, eating, sleeping and volunteering in small local communities, contributing to the well-being of places they visit. Thanks to the green pilgrimage, great attention is paid to the maintenance of pilgrimage sites. Increasingly, these areas are being adversely affected: the local environment is not harmed and natural resources are rationally used. Green pilgrimage combines tourism types such as pilgrimage tourism, spiritual tourism, religious tourism, sacral tourism, which are very interrelated and some authors use these types of tourism as synonyms. Abad-Galzacorta and Guereño-Omil (2016) describe a pilgrimage tourism in their work; other authors, such as Durán-Sánchez, Álvarez-García, de la Cruz del Rio Rama and Oliveira (2018), Griffin, Raj (2017), Moufahim, Lichrou (2018), Sarumi (2018), Terzidou, Scarles, Saunders (2017) deal with pilgrimage tourism concept and essence. A description of religious tourism is provided in the work of DuranSánchez, Álvarez-García, de la Cruz del Rio-Rama and Oliveira (2018), Griffin, Raj (2017), Syamala, Kakoti (2016). Also Cheer, Belhassen, Kujawa (2017), Norman, Pokorny (2017) write about spiritual tourism.It is important to emphasize that the authors, such as Różycki, Dryglas (2017) and Temizel, Attar, (2015) describe religious or pilgrimage tourism and use it in their articles as the concepts of sacral and religious tourism. In Lithuania there is no research on green pilgrimage, which emphasises the problem of the research as well as the topicality, as the first steps on this topic are taken. The aim of the research - to explore the perspectives of green pilgrimage tourism in Lithuania. Methodology of work: analysis of scientific articles, publications, documents, qualitative research - semi-structured interviews, systematization of obtained research data, graphic representation, formulation of conclusions and recommendations. Keywords: green tourism, pilgramage tourism, St. James’s Way Lithuania.
