Tourist potential of the Leningrad Region for thematic tourism development

From birth, humans are innately driven by a desire for knowledge – that is, the exploration, analysis, and new information application. Tourism allowing people to explore their surroundings, can fully satisfy this need. Traveling allows you to escape the daily routine, visit new places, and immerse yourself in local population’s culture and everyday life. While there are a wide variety of tourism types aimed at different target audiences, cultural and educational tourism remains the most popular and highly demanded. This popularity is due to the fact that this type of tourism has the widest variety of offers in terms of destinations, because almost any destination has interesting sights, and even if a person has repeatedly visited a country, region, area or city, there’s always a new place to visit that will allow you to see a familiar area from a completely different perspective. Thus, cultural and educational tourism is based on a wide variety of tourist and recreational resources, among which cultural, historical, and natural tourist and recreational resources are the most significant. The Leningrad Region has rich tourism potential; almost every region boasts fascinating attractions that make it possible to develop themed tours. In this article, the authors examined the Leningrad Region’s tourism potential for thematic tourism development. Based on the collected and analyzed information, cultural and historical potential assessment of the region was conducted.