Spatial Analysis of Food Tourism Attractions Case Study of Mazandaran Province

Just as other aspects of life’s rituals, costumes and languages, cuisine is believed to be a key cultural element in tourism. Nevertheless, the importance of food tourism attractions in planning tourist destinations has been less studied. This article examines the role of food tourism capacities on the spatial centrality of tourism destinations. To this end, the network analysis approach and Gravity model were applied to the case of Mazandaran province. The spatial interactions of food tourism destinations were determined by the number and variety of tourism attractions and infrastructure and distance of cities as a limiting factor for spatial interactions. Then the degree centrality, betweenness centrality and eigenvector centrality were calculated using the UCINET software and converted to GIS maps. The results show that food tourism can change the landscape of regional tourism development capacities. The county of Babol has less tourism infrastructure, in comparison with some other counties of Mazandaran Province. However, it has the highest level of food tourism centrality and was the most suitable region for the food tourism development. Also, the most suitable centers for the establishment of food tourism quality monitoring centers and tourism information and guidance centers are the Babol and Amol Counties in the west and the Chalus County in the East part of the Mazandaran province.