The Braga Business Association, in partnership with the Universidade Católica - Braga, yesterday took a group of tour operators to visit three factories to show them the potential they can offer their clients.
The aim is to focus on so-called industrial tourism, a niche market that the AEB argues is little explored in this region. "We have done little to exploit the tourist dimension of our industrial projects. In fact, industrial tourism is a fast-growing sector and we in our region are fortunate to have a number of projects, some larger and others smaller, which have this enormous potential to be linked with tourism and to provide pleasant experiences for those who come to our region," the AEB director-general told journalists.
According to Rui Marques, tourism is currently one of the main sectors of the economy and is often very oriented towards public spaces and other types of equipment that leave little economic value for the community.
"Therefore, our aim is for this sector of activity to retain as much economic value as possible for our region, in order to create more companies, more jobs, more wealth and more development for the area," he added. For AEB's director-general, these companies that create products, most of them with their own brand, which are unique and almost exclusive to our region, are an asset for the region, take Braga's name out of doors and have enormous potential for visitors.
So, yesterday afternoon, the AEB took tourist agents, heads of tourist entertainment companies and some students from the Catholic University of Braga to visit three companies and get to know what they do and what they can offer tourists. "Basically, this is about bringing the companies closer together and letting them know what they do, so that partnerships can be established so that these projects can also be used in Braga's tourism program," says Rui Marques.
According to the AEB's director-general, "one of the Achilles heels of small cities on an international scale, such as Braga, is sometimes the lack of tourist content to keep people for longer". "Cultural tourists visit very quickly. They increasingly value experiences, especially sensory experiences. So if we manage to add this type of experience, whether it's in the factory that produces beers, the factory that builds musical instruments or the perfume factory, where they all show their production processes, tourists can also take this dimension of experimentation with them," he said.
