EVOLUTION OF CULTURAL TOURISM: CASE STUDY FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN ECOMUSEUM IN THE PROVINCE OF MANABI (ECUADOR)

The tourist has experienced a change of mentality over time. The tourist has undergone a shift in attitude over time and shows, more and more, a greater interest in understanding and learning about other ways of life and cultural practices. In this sense, traditionally, most of society's patrimonial collections until recent times were in museums. Nowadays, the new museology extends its contents beyond the traditional museum's four walls as it has reinvented itself and opened itself to new initiatives. One of these are the ecomuseums. This paper shows the analysis of the tourist value of the Province of Manabi (Canton of Puerto Lopez), as a strategic point for creating an ecomuseum. The aim is to conserve and responsibly use heritage resources with environmental, historical, archaeological, ethnographic, and landscape value. The objective is that the benefit that the ecomuseum can bring to the comunity. For this, we have used a methodology with a quantitative and qualitative approach to achieve our objectives.