Tourist Map

a geographic map designed for tourists. A specific requirement of tourist maps is that they be clearly drawn and legible—a requirement that applies to such supplementary map features as drawings, photographs, indexed guides, explanatory text, and various information and reference material.

General-purpose tourist maps, as distinguished from specialized ones, include such common geographic features as road networks, population centers, rivers, lakes, forests, and land relief, as well as items of special tourist interest, including architectural and historical landmarks, preserves, national parks, museums, hotels, tourist centers, and camping sites. Such maps serve to acquaint tourists with a given district and provide information on possible travel routes, on the location of specific landmarks, and on the availability of tourist services.

In terms of territorial range and method of presentation, the general-purpose map category may be divided into survey maps, tour maps, and city plans. Survey maps (with scales ranging from 1:200,000 to 1:1,000,000) may be of the country as a whole or of individual territorial-administrative units or geographic regions of particular interest for tourists. Tour maps indicate schematically the narrow course of tour itineraries (foot routes, skiing routes, waterways, automobile or railroad travel routes, or some combination of these). The maps that indicate foot routes are usually on a scale ranging from 1:100,000 to 1:400,000; the others are on a smaller scale. City plans for tourist use may be in the form of individually published maps, or they may be issued as supplements to survey or tour maps or be included in atlases.

Specialized maps are published for the use of foreign tourists; they serve as advertisements for tourism and as a means to publicize vacation spots, sightseeing landmarks, and tourist attractions. Another type of specialized map, published abroad, is used for orienteering competitions. Some tourist maps focus on a specific theme, such as a region’s architectural landmarks. The following categories of maps are designed to coordinate and plan various aspects of the tourist branch of the economy: (1) maps that evaluate the natural, sociocultural, and economic conditions as well as the engineering prerequisites for developing tourism; (2) maps showing the connections between recreational resources and tourist concentrations (for example, the stability of geosys-tems in relation to tourist loads); and (3) tourist districting maps, which provide comprehensive data on a given area’s potential for organized tourist activities.

For convenience of use, tourist maps are usually published in the form of booklets or portable notebooks; they are also frequently published as part of multipurpose atlases.