Results
The tourism zones
In an attempt to find effective alternative tourism areas for hub-and-spoke tourist consumption
patterns in the Pyrenees region, the cluster analysis results in nine tourism areas
(see Figure 2).
When we compare these new tourism zones (Figure 2) with conventional administrative
regions (Figure 1) we observe major differences. On one hand, the spatial extension
of existing regional tourism destinations (administrative regions) is less uniform than
in the ‘new’ tourism zones. The former coincide with administrative regions. In contrast,
the tourism areas proposed in this paper have a more realistic scale for within-destination
tourism consumption, with maximal internal distances ranging between 1–2 hours’
drive time. On the other hand, all new zones are cross-border, five of them spreading over
international borders and the remaining four over regional borders. We also observe
(Table 1) how much the new zones are cross-border in terms of the percentages of space
(number of municipalities) that belong to different administrative regions. So in
one extreme we have Aragon Pyrenees as the less cross-border intensive area in that it
coincides with Huesca Province in 93% and with Lleida province in only 7%. In the other
extreme we find the Pallars–Ariege area with 46% of municipalities belonging to the
Lleida province and 54% to the Ariege department. The distribution of the rest of the