A systematic literature review (SLR) was designed to analyse the current state of knowledge on rural tourism development, sustainable tourism, and outdoor activities to consolidate and interlink these three topics. For this purpose, 28 articles published in the Scopus and Web of Science databases were reviewed through the Preferred Articles for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA). This research aims to develop a SLR to identify the association between rural tourism, sustainable tourism, and outdoor activities, searching to answer the research question (RQ): what is the relationship between rural tourism development, sustainable tourism and outdoor activities for the scientific literature? First, through a qualitative approach, this study considered 215 articles from the respective databases and excluded 54 repeated articles, resulting in 161 articles for analysis. In a second step, after conducting a more detailed analysis, 54 articles were excluded due to their title and abstract, and 79 articles were excluded for not meeting the objectives. In the end, 28 articles were considered for the SLR. This analysis provides knowledge about sustainability, outdoor activities, and rural tourism from a co-occurrence perspective to emphasise the valuable content addressed by the researchers. Hence, the main results of this study highlight the relationship between rural tourism and sustainable tourism as concepts that operate in partnership and simultaneously. In addition, there were some references for outdoor activities about the participation of rural tourism and sustainable tourism destinations in outdoor contexts.
This project is being carried out within the scope of the TURNOUT Project-Development of Outdoor Tourism of Northern Portugal, POCI-01-0145-ERDF-032289, financed by the European Investment Fund Regional Development (ERDF) through the Operational Program of Competitiveness and Innovation (POCI) and the Foundation for Science and Technology, IP (OE). The authors are also grateful to the UNIAG, R&D unit funded by the FCT—Portuguese Foundation for the Development of Science and Technology, Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education. “Project Code Reference: UIDB/04752/2020”.
