Intensive tourist-related urbanisation impacts on a mountain village: The case study of Veľká Lomnica in Slovakia

A key feature of contemporary tourism is massive investment on the part of developers in tourism-related urbanisation, with this made most manifest in the construction of recreational apartment houses, and the expansion of ski slopes and golf courses. For obvious reasons, such activities are directed at traditional centres of tourism, which respond to the current trend towards hedonism present in society. However, major development activity has also taken place in municipalities in which tourism only began to play its more significant part once social and political transformation had already occurred. An example is the Slovak municipality of Veľká Lomnica, a village in which golf-course construction has initiated large-scale development projects. The aim of the work described in this paper was precisely to address this example in assessing the impact of tourism-related urbanisation on the municipality in question.