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Lake tourism is a growing academic sub-field of tourism studies with an emerging body of literature. However, little research attention has been given to lake-destinations’ projected or perceived tourism images. Specifically, there has been a scarcity of literature investigating the variables involved in the formation of a lake-destination image. Therefore, this study aims to explore the main attributes that might potentially influence this type of destination, and simultaneously, contribute to conceptualizing and defining lake tourism as recent research area. An explorative study was then conducted in order to generate a set of image variables through the use of textual and photographic data. The results will contribute to characterize potential lake-destinations and to develop a final list of variables specifically related to this type of destination.

The literature review reveals that lake tourism and lake-destination areas (LDA) have been particularly absent from destination image (DI) studies over 45 years of research. In fact, there is a lack of research concerning the characteristics of lake tourism, particularly related to the attributes involved in the formation of lake-DI. Therefore, this paper aims to explore lake tourism and lake-DI based on the Alqueva Lake more thoroughly, it being the biggest man-made lake in Europe, as an emerging lake-destination area located in the south of Portugal.

Within this, the perceptions of stakeholders professionally involved with this type of destination were examined through 17 semi-structured interviews based on content-analysis as a qualitative technique. Framed by the important contribution of visual-based research in tourism studies, this study adopts two approaches: an attribute-based approach (textual data) and a photo-based approach (visual data), to strengthen the concept, characteristics and dimensions of lake tourism and image attributes applied to this type of destinations. Multiple techniques of extracting data were used, demonstrating the importance of using various techniques in obtaining image attributes as a first step in assessing DIs.

The findings revealed textual and pictorial attributes related to lake tourism and LDA, which confirms that although image attributes are universally important, depicting specific attributes is important considering particular types of tourism, such as lake tourism.

This is a very recent sub-field of DI studies, which justifies its investigation on a theoretical as well as on a practical management level.