Metropolitan areas provide many opportunities to spend quality outdoor leisure time as well as to discover many cultural attractions. Sprawl occurs in Romania quite rapidly, encouraged by the construction of ring roads around many cities and their expansion into metropolitan areas. The current paper aims to identify metropolitan tourism models based on which tourist flows can be sustainably reoriented within rural Oradea Metropolitan Area (OMA) given their the tourist potential level (i.e., very low, low, average, high). The tourist potential was scaled based on the Methodology for the Analysis of a Territory’s Tourist Potential, which stands as a law published in the Official Monitor of the 14th of June 2016. The study indicates that most tourist activity develops in the OMA southern part in Sânmartin commune, thus unsustainably capturing all tourist flows of the rural OMA. Natural and man-made tourist attractions’ territorial concentrations were emphasized in the communes from the south and northern OMA, but there are major territorial dysfunctions in terms of technical endowment and tourist infrastructure supply. The three emerged models refer to the medical–recreational and eco–residential wellness network, discovery eco-holiday, and co-visit and marginal community.

Metropolitan regions/areas are NUTS 3 regions or a combination of NUTS 3 regions which represent all agglomerations of at least 250,000 inhabitants (Eurostat, 2021). Oradea Metropolitan Area (NUTS3ID RO111) was established in 9th of May 2005 and has a total number of 251.570 inhabitants. The purpose of the association is to stimulate and support the growth and prosperity of the area, focused on the continuous increase of the quality of life. Besides the economic boost, OMA emerged from the need for space and leisure expressed by the core urbanites and although the periurban area is teeming with valuable cultural resources, the latter being the focus of the current study, they are little known by many of the Oradea residents. In this purpose the cultural attractions of the rural OMA were inventoried, analysed and stored in an online open-access database so that tourists can enjoy them and entrepreneurs in tourism can use them as focal points for further tourist infrastructure development. The analysis highlighted the OMA periurban area with the highest cultural attractions’ potential based on the National Methodology regarding the evaluation of the tourist potential in the basic administrative-territorial units.

The current study focuses on the demographic profile research of Nature 2000 sites belonging to 28 administrative entities located in Bihor County, in northwestern Romania. For the purposes of this study, out of the 74 local administrative units (LAUs) holding protected areas of the type Nature 2000 while only sites that cover over 40% of the administrative entities’ area were taken into account. Starting from the interrelation of the contact between human communities and local ecosystems, the research sought to determine the interdependence level between the local residents’ lifestyle and the biodiversity-related maintenance/preservation of these protected areas. Based on the referenced statistics, more demographic indicators were calculated (population decrement, population density, structure by age, dependency index, active population and structure by industry) and basic indicators of pressure on the environment (naturality index, human pressure through land use and forest area per capita). Each of these factors are meant to reveal how man cohabitates with nature in a balanced or disrupted manner according to the study results. Thus, considering the 28 LAUs from case to case, areas where environmental health tends to insecurity were identified, but there are cases in which it is satisfactory thanks to the existence of massive woodlands over wide areas, while also being due to a considerable demographic decrement.

This study examines the determinants of post-crisis tourism performance by comparing 207 Romanian tourist destinations in 2023, the first post-pandemic year, with their pre-pandemic performance in 2019. Grounded in Destination Competitiveness and Attractiveness Models, this study employs a negative binomial regression to analyse how recent investment projects, the expansion of accommodation capacity, and historical, pre-pandemic destination performance influence current tourist demand. Our results indicate that strong pre-pandemic tourism performance and strategic investments in tourist destinations are significant predictors of increased overnight stays, highlighting the role of pre-existing competitiveness in post-crisis tourism recovery. Accommodation capacity’s impact is more complex, as an expanding lodging supply raises overnight stays overall, but its effect differs sharply between regions. Ten additional accommodation establishments correspond to an estimated 34.9% increase in the north-east against 3.2% in the south-east region, and this contrast is statistically significant. Returns to capacity expansion, therefore, vary by an order of magnitude within a single country, challenging the assumption of a universal tourism development model and indicating that such returns depend on whether unmet demand exists locally. The findings support place-based, sustainable and resilience-oriented tourism policies that address regional disparities and direct investment where it can generate sustainable demand.

A nation's vitality, dynamism and economic strength will always be related to its demographic component, and a healthy and vigorous population will ensure its long-term future. However, the current realities demonstrate the existence of an obvious population decrement at the level of the entire country particularly triggered by the birth rate decrease and the high demographic aging to which other factors add ap specific to local communities, which in their turn determined a particular type of demographic behaviour. Therefore we aim to analyze those elements with a major population dynamics impact such as family stability and demographic potential that can generate a specific demographic behaviour, as a result of the major changes that have occurred in the last period of time. These elements are translated through several demographic indicators that characterize the family, such as the nuptiality index and the divorce index whose evolution was registered and analyzed for the period 1992-2021. Their evolution indicates the demographic potential of Romania, as well as of Bihor county.