Sustainable tourism was being discussed long before Mrs. Brundtland’s commission delivered its verdict on the general economic development process. It emerged as a theoretical concept in the European Alps and around the Mediterranean Sea in the late 1970s. But theory was long in discussion before it became practice - that had to wait until the late 1980s, (see Krippendorf, 1984, 1987) and until recently the concept was slow to find widespread implementation.