Análise da visitação das unidades de conservação de Minas Gerais.

The Protected Areas (ANP) have great tourist potential, whose visitation demand has grown significantly in recent years, without this advance being accompanied by improvements in management and knowledge on the subject, which requires constant updates. In this sense, this study proposes to analyze variations in visitation between protected areas in Minas Gerais, contributing to advances in management and regional development. Using complementary studies, written in the format of scientific articles, this dissertation aims, initially, to analyze the Tourist Attractiveness Indexes of the ANP inserted in the State Parks Concession Program of Minas Gerais (PARC). To this end, based on variables of managerial, biophysical and social interest, 20 ANP were classified, characterized and compared in terms of average visits between 2015 and 2019. The results show that the most structured areas are concentrated in the Atlantic Forest or in its transition for the Cerrado, and, for the most part, are of the extensive type (65%), presenting, however, great disparity between their internal and external environments. From such heterogeneity, we conclude that it is necessary to encourage new concessions and the implementation of an administration based on singularities, in an antithesis of the current normative massification. The second part of the dissertation brings an analysis of the possible factors that interfere in the visits of the areas. The study covered biophysical, social and management aspects of the internal and external environments, analyzing eleven variables that were correlated to the average visitation between 2015 and 2019, with a significance level of 10%. As a result, it was observed that reputation was the only variable, among those listed, that had an impact on the number of visitors, thus being a factor to be considered when intending to boost tourism in state ANP. Thus, it is worth emphasizing that the analysis of visitation is complex and requires an expansion of approaches, beyond the isolated perception of factors, in order to allow the definition of strategies that increase the competitiveness of these ANP, as destinations of nature, against the tourist market. Keywords: Tourism management. Visitor. Protected areas. Public policy