Explain how touristic resources create hotspots, apply and evaluate Butler’s model, compare spheres of influence, analyse a national league’s geography and evaluate a rural festival’s impacts, using the Bundesliga and Glastonbury.
Each is in the Geography glossary, with every other term in the subject.
The use of a place's scenery, heritage or atmosphere as a product that visitors experience and pay for, which can change or degrade the landscape being consumed.
A process in which an initial advantage attracts investment and growth, which create further advantages and growth, so success builds on itself in an upward spiral.
A map that shows straight lines from each user's place of origin to a facility or destination, used to show its sphere of influence.
The decline in an interaction, such as the number of visitors to a facility, as distance from it increases.
The first stage of Butler's model, when small numbers of independent, adventurous visitors arrive and there are almost no facilities built for tourists.
The supporters of a sports team, from local season-ticket holders to national and global followers who watch through broadcasting and social media.
An organised event, held regularly or once, that celebrates music, culture, religion, sport or arts and attracts large numbers of people to a place for a short time.
Distinguish between primary and secondary touristic resources, with real examples.
Explain the human and physical factors that lead to the growth of urban and rural tourism hotspots.
Draw and annotate Butler’s tourism area life cycle, and evaluate it as a model of resort development.
Explain how and why the sphere of influence varies between neighbourhood parks and gyms, city stadiums and national parks.
Describe how a sphere of influence can be measured and mapped, including desire-line maps and distance decay.
Examine the factors that affect the location of a national sports league’s hierarchy of teams and the distribution of its supporters.
Explain why large festivals need particular site factors, and evaluate their costs and benefits for different stakeholders.
Analyse a rural festival, Glastonbury, as a temporary site of leisure.
Some places attract far more visitors than others. A coastline, a mountain range, a historic city centre, a football stadium or a farm that hosts a festival for five days a year can all become sites of leisure, drawing people from a local neighbourhood, a whole country or the world. Physical and human factors together turn such places into sites of leisure at the local and national scale.
The key concepts of place and process are at the centre. Each site of leisure depends on the characteristics of its place (its landscape, climate, history and accessibility), and it changes through processes of investment, growth and decline. Spatial interactions matter too: the users of a park, the supporters of a club and the audience of a festival all travel from other places, and the pattern of those flows defines each facility’s reach.
72 exam-style questions on this subtopic, written in the style of the IB papers. The first has its markscheme open. Counted on
To what extent can sporting activities be clearly categorized by cost, popularity and site?
10 marks
Marks should be allocated according to the markbands.
The guide categorizes sporting activities by cost (the cost of equipment, facilities, membership, travel and coaching), popularity (the number of participants and/or spectators, at local, national or global scale) and site (where the sport takes place: indoor or outdoor; natural sites or purpose-built facilities; urban or rural). The question asks how clear and reliable these categories are. Accept answers that discuss either the clarity of individual categories or the usefulness of the scheme as a whole.
Possible applied themes (AO2) demonstrating knowledge and understanding (AO1):
Cost categories can be clear: running and football need very little equipment, while polo, sailing, skiing and motorsport require costly equipment, facilities or travel.
But cost varies with the level of participation and the place: football can be played with a home-made ball in a street in Accra or in an expensive academy in Spain; golf is relatively cheap on public courses in Scotland but expensive in many Asian cities.
Popularity depends on scale: football is globally popular; cricket is dominant in India, Pakistan and Australia but little played in most of Latin America; some sports are national or regional (Gaelic games in Ireland, sumo in Japan, kabaddi in South Asia).
Participation and spectating must be distinguished: football has huge television audiences, but in many high-income countries more adults take part in walking, swimming, running or gym exercise.
Popularity changes over time (eg the rapid growth of padel in Spain and elsewhere; e-sports; growth of women's football after the England team won the women's European Championship in 2022).
With a free account, Augment remembers where you stopped and what you have practiced.
A closed league in which membership is fixed by the league, with no promotion or relegation, and teams (franchises) may relocate to other cities.
The ranking of clubs in a sports league system into levels or divisions, from a top tier with a few wealthy clubs down to many smaller ones.
A specialised facility that is used infrequently, has a large range and threshold population, and draws users from a large sphere of influence, such as a national park or national stadium.
A common facility that is used frequently, has a small range and threshold population, and serves a small local area, such as a neighbourhood park or gym.
An organised competition in which clubs from one country play each other over a season, often arranged in a hierarchy of divisions.
Features that exist independently of tourism and attract visitors, such as climate, landscape, coasts, wildlife, historic buildings, culture and religious sites.
A system in which the most successful teams in a division move up to a higher division and the least successful move down at the end of each season.
A tourist resort planned and constructed specifically for tourism, often on a largely undeveloped site, rather than growing gradually from an existing settlement.
The maximum distance people are prepared to travel to use a particular service or facility.
In Butler's model, a renewed growth in visitor numbers after stagnation, brought about by new attractions, investment, re-branding or new markets.
Facilities and services created to serve or attract visitors, such as accommodation, restaurants, transport, ski lifts, theme parks, conference centres and marketing.
The physical and human characteristics of the land where an event or settlement is located, such as space, relief, drainage, water supply, access and ownership.
The area from which a facility, such as a park, stadium or national park, draws its users or visitors; also called its catchment area.
A place that is used intensively for leisure for a short period, such as a festival or event site, before returning to its normal use and population.
The minimum number of users or customers needed to keep a service or facility economically viable.
Butler's model (1980) of how a tourist destination grows and changes through exploration, involvement, development, consolidation and stagnation, followed by decline, stabilisation or rejuvenation.
A place with a very high concentration of visitors relative to its size or resident population, at the local, regional or national scale.
A tourism hotspot is a place with a very high concentration of visitors relative to its size or resident population. Hotspots exist at every scale: a single beach, a historic city such as Venice, a national park such as Banff, or a whole country such as France, which recorded 102 million international arrivals in 2024, more than any other country.
Geographers divide what attracts visitors into two groups. Primary touristic resources are features that exist independently of tourism, such as climate, scenery, beaches, mountains, wildlife, historic buildings, culture and religious sites. Secondary touristic resources are the facilities created to serve or attract visitors, such as hotels, restaurants, airports, ski lifts, theme parks, conference centres and marketing campaigns. Textbooks also call them tourism resources.
Primary resources are usually the reason why visitors want to come. Secondary resources decide whether they can reach the place, stay there and spend money.
A hotspot needs both. Antarctica has outstanding primary resources (ice sheets, glaciers, penguin colonies) but almost no secondary ones, so visitor numbers stay small and nearly all visitors arrive by cruise ship. Dubai is the opposite case: its primary resources are a warm winter climate and a desert coast, but most of its attractions are secondary resources built since the 1990s, including artificial islands such as Palm Jumeirah, very large shopping malls, theme parks and one of the world’s busiest international airports.
Hotspot | Primary touristic resources | Secondary touristic resources |
|---|---|---|
Venice, Italy | Lagoon setting, canals, medieval and Renaissance architecture | Hotels, water-bus network, cruise terminal, international airport |
Banff National Park, Canada | Rocky Mountain peaks, glaciers, lakes, wildlife, hot springs | Ski resorts and lifts, hotels in Banff town, the Trans-Canada Highway |
Dubai, UAE | Warm, sunny winter climate, desert and coast | Artificial islands, malls, theme parks, hub airport, major events |
Antarctica | Ice sheets, glaciers, wildlife, remoteness | Very few: cruise ships and a small number of camps |
Hotspots grow when a set of physical and human factors combine. Physical factors provide the attraction; human factors determine whether the attraction can be reached and used.
Physical factors | Human factors |
|---|---|
Climate: reliable sunshine (the Mediterranean in summer), snow (the Alps in winter), warm winters (the Caribbean, Dubai) | Accessibility: airports, low-cost air routes, high-speed rail, motorways, visa rules |
Scenery and relief: mountains, gorges, volcanoes, waterfalls | Heritage and culture: historic buildings, museums, festivals, cuisine |
Coasts and beaches: sand, warm sea, coral reefs | Accommodation and infrastructure: hotels, water, energy, sanitation |
Wildlife and ecosystems: safari parks, rainforests, reefs | Safety and political stability; price and exchange rates |
Natural wonders: the Grand Canyon, Victoria Falls | Image, marketing and media (films, social media); government policy and investment |
Human factors can change much faster than physical ones. Low-cost airlines turned cities such as Kraków and Porto into short-break hotspots within a few years, while conflict or a terrorist attack can empty a hotspot almost overnight.
Once a place starts to attract visitors, its success tends to build on itself. This upward spiral is called cumulative causation. Visitors spend money, which raises profits and encourages investment in more hotels, transport and attractions; these secondary resources improve the place’s image and accessibility, which attracts still more visitors. Tourism businesses also cluster together, a form of agglomeration, because they benefit from the same visitors, workers and infrastructure.
The process also works in reverse. If visitor numbers fall, businesses close, investment stops and the destination looks run-down, which deters more visitors.
Urban hotspots include heritage cities such as Venice, Barcelona and Kyoto, where visitors come for historic architecture and culture, and global cities such as London, Paris, Dubai and Bangkok, which combine heritage with shopping, events, business tourism and major airports. The growth of low-cost flights and online accommodation platforms created the "city break" of two or three nights, which has concentrated visitors in the historic centres of European cities.
Rural hotspots are based mainly on primary resources: mountains, lakes, coasts, forests and wildlife. Examples include Banff National Park in the Canadian Rockies (established in 1885, with about 4.5 million visits a year by 2025), the Lake District in England (17.73 million visitors in 2024, and a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape since 2017), the sandstone pillars of Zhangjiajie in China, the island of Bali in Indonesia, and Queenstown in New Zealand, which markets itself as a centre for adventure sports.
Sources: Wikipedia, "Lake District National Park" and "Banff National Park", 2026.
Tourists "consume" places in a particular sense. The consumption of landscapes is the use of scenery, heritage or atmosphere as a product that visitors pay to experience: the view from a mountain top, the atmosphere of a medieval street or the sight of a glacier. Unlike buying a physical good, consuming a landscape does not use it up at once, but heavy use can change or degrade it.
Footpath erosion on popular fells in the Lake District, crowding at viewpoints that become famous on social media, and the replacement of local shops by souvenir shops in historic centres are all examples. How far a site can absorb this use before it is damaged is the question of carrying capacity, which is central to managing tourism sustainably.
In 1980 the Canadian geographer Richard Butler proposed a model of how tourist destinations grow, mature and then change: Butler’s tourism area life cycle (TALC). It suggests that visitor numbers follow an S-shaped curve over time, similar to the life cycle of a product, until the destination reaches the limits of its capacity.
Exploration: a small number of adventurous, independent visitors arrive, attracted by primary resources. There are almost no facilities built for tourists, and visitors use local accommodation and services. Contact with residents is close. These are the allocentric travellers of Plog’s psychographic model.
Involvement: local people begin to provide services for visitors, such as guesthouses, cafés and boat trips. A tourist season starts to appear, and some local advertising begins.
Development: outside investment arrives. Hotel chains and tour operators run by transnational corporations (TNCs) build large hotels, package tourism begins, and marketing reaches national and international markets. Visitor numbers rise steeply, and in peak season visitors may outnumber residents. Control passes from local people to outside companies, and mid-centric travellers replace the explorers.
Consolidation: growth slows, although numbers are still rising. Tourism dominates the local economy. Older facilities begin to age, and some residents begin to resent the visitors.
Stagnation: visitor numbers peak as the destination reaches its carrying capacity. Its image becomes dated, it depends on repeat visitors and cheap packages, and environmental, social and economic problems appear. Psychocentric visitors dominate.
After stagnation: the destination may decline (visitors go elsewhere, hotels close or are converted to housing), stabilise (numbers stay roughly constant), or undergo rejuvenation (new attractions, investment, re-branding or new markets bring renewed growth).
The first stage of the model, the exploration stage, is now hard to find in its pure form, because guidebooks, social media and online booking reach almost every place. Rejuvenation usually needs heavy investment by local government or private companies, and the new product often attracts a different type of visitor from the original one.
Rejuvenation is possible only where there is enough investment and a new reason to visit.
Benidorm, on Spain’s Costa Blanca, grew from a fishing village to a mass-tourism resort from the 1950s, with a town plan that encouraged high-rise hotels. Its development stage coincided with the package holiday boom, and it has since tried to rejuvenate by improving its seafront and targeting families and older visitors. Blackpool in north-west England grew in the 19th century as a railway resort for industrial workers, reached its peak in the mid-20th century and then declined as holidaymakers went abroad; it has invested in its promenade and attractions to try to rejuvenate.
Some places do not follow the sequence at all. A purpose-built resort is planned and constructed specifically for tourism, often on an almost empty site, so it skips exploration and involvement and starts at development. Cancún in Mexico is the classic example: the Mexican government chose the site, development began in January 1970 when only a few people lived on the barrier island, and the government financed the first nine hotels because private investors were reluctant. The city had about 889,000 residents in 2020 and received a record 21 million tourists in 2023.
Sources: Wikipedia, "Cancún", 2026.
Strengths | Limitations |
|---|---|
Simple and visual; easy to apply to real resorts and to compare them | Stages are hard to identify at the time; they are usually recognised afterwards |
Links visitor numbers to changes in facilities, ownership and visitor types | Not every resort follows the sequence: purpose-built resorts such as Cancún start at development |
Warns planners that growth meets limits, so management is needed before stagnation | Ignores external shocks (terrorism, hurricanes, pandemics) that can cause sudden decline |
Shows that decline is not inevitable: rejuvenation is possible | Underplays the role of government policy and large companies in shaping change |
Connects to Plog’s model of visitor types at each stage | Carrying capacity is not a fixed number; it changes with management, technology and perception |
Butler’s model is most useful as a framework for asking questions about a destination: what stage it appears to be in, what is driving change, and what could happen next. It is weakest as a predictive tool, because the length of each stage and the outcome after stagnation depend on decisions by governments, investors and residents rather than on an inevitable sequence.
Every leisure facility draws its users from a surrounding area. The sphere of influence (or catchment area) of a facility is the area from which it draws its users or visitors. A neighbourhood park may draw people from a few streets; a national park may draw them from the whole country and abroad.
Two ideas explain the size of a sphere of influence. They come from Christaller’s central place theory (1933), which was developed to explain the spacing of settlements and services, and they apply equally well to leisure facilities.
The range is the maximum distance people are prepared to travel to use a facility. People will walk a few minutes to a local park, but travel hundreds of kilometres to a national park or a major final.
The threshold population is the minimum number of users needed to keep a facility viable. A small gym needs enough members within easy reach to cover its rent and staff; a 60,000-seat stadium needs a very large population of potential supporters.
The range sets the outer limit of a sphere of influence; the threshold decides whether a facility can survive within it.
Facilities can be arranged in a hierarchy. A low-order facility is common, cheap and used often, so it has a small range and a low threshold, and many of them are spread evenly through settled areas. A high-order facility is rare, specialised and used infrequently, so it has a large range and a high threshold, and there are few of them.
Most people use low-order facilities every week, but visit a high-order facility only a few times a year or once in a lifetime.
Facility | Order | Typical sphere of influence | Frequency of visits | Example |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Neighbourhood park or playground | Low | A few hundred metres to 1–2 km; most users walk | Daily or weekly | A local park in any town |
Gym or leisure centre | Low to middle | A few kilometres; users walk, cycle or drive | Several times a week | A chain gym in a suburban retail park |
City stadium | Middle to high | City-region for match-day attendance; national and global for broadcast audiences | Fortnightly in season | Borussia Dortmund’s 81,365-capacity stadium |
National park | High | National and international | Once a year or less; often several days | Yellowstone (USA): 4.76 million recreation visits in 2025 |
Sources: Wikipedia, "Yellowstone National Park", citing the US National Park Service, 2026; Wikipedia, "2026–27 Bundesliga", 2026.
A city stadium has two spheres. Its physical sphere is the area from which supporters travel to matches, usually the city and surrounding region, overlapping with the spheres of rival clubs. Its virtual sphere, created by television, streaming and social media, can be global.
A national park has the largest physical sphere. Yellowstone, established in 1872 as the world’s first national park, draws visitors from across the USA and abroad, many of whom stay for several days. In England, the Peak District has a very large number of day visitors because the cities of Manchester and Sheffield lie on its edges, so much of its sphere is within an hour’s drive.
Within any sphere of influence, the number of users falls with distance from the facility. This is distance decay. It happens because travelling further costs more time and money, and because people closer to another similar facility tend to use that one instead. Distance decay is steeper for low-order facilities, which people will not travel far to reach, and for groups with less access to transport, such as children, older people and households without a car.
Real spheres of influence are not circles. They are stretched along motorways and railway lines, cut short by barriers such as rivers and borders, and squeezed where a rival facility competes for the same users. The main factors are:
Transport and accessibility: a new motorway junction, a tram line or a low-cost air route enlarges the sphere; poor public transport shrinks it for people without cars.
Cost: entry prices, parking charges and travel costs reduce the range for low-income users.
Uniqueness: the only ski slope or national park in a region draws users from far away; a gym that is one of many has a small sphere.
Competition: two similar facilities close together divide the area between them.
Marketing, events and reputation: a famous club, a UNESCO listing or a major event can extend a sphere far beyond its normal limits.
A sphere of influence can be measured directly with a simple survey. Researchers stand at the facility’s entrance at a range of times and days, and ask a sample of users where they have travelled from (a postcode or town), how they travelled and how often they come. Each origin is then plotted on a map and joined to the facility with a straight line, producing a desire-line map. A boundary is drawn round the area containing most users (often 80%), which defines the sphere of influence. Origins can also be grouped by distance band and shown as proportional flow lines or a bar chart of users per distance band.
The survey design affects the result. Surveying only on a weekend morning or only at one entrance may give a biased sample; a stratified sample across days and times gives a more reliable picture.
Where two towns compete to attract users, Reilly’s law of retail gravitation estimates the "breaking point" between their spheres of influence. It assumes that the larger town attracts users from further away, in proportion to its population:
where is the distance of the breaking point from the smaller town B, is the distance between the towns, and and are their populations.
A national sports league is an organised competition in which clubs from one country play each other over a season. Its geography has two parts: where the clubs are located, and where their supporters live.
Most European football leagues are arranged as a pyramid of divisions, a hierarchy of teams in which a few wealthy clubs sit at the top and many smaller clubs below. Clubs move through the hierarchy by promotion and relegation: at the end of each season the most successful teams in a division move up, and the least successful move down. In the Bundesliga, for example, the bottom two clubs are relegated automatically, the top two in the 2. Bundesliga are promoted, and the 16th-placed club plays a two-legged play-off against the third-placed club from the division below.
Promotion and relegation act as a filter: the location of top-flight clubs changes every season as cities gain and lose places.
North American professional leagues work differently. The National Football League (NFL), the National Basketball Association (NBA) and Major League Baseball are each a franchise league: a closed league with a fixed membership and no promotion or relegation. To keep competition balanced, they use a draft (the weakest teams choose new players first) and, in the NFL and NBA, a salary cap. Because a franchise is not tied to one place by the threat of relegation, owners can move it to a bigger or richer market: the NFL’s Raiders moved from Oakland to Las Vegas in 2020, after Las Vegas offered a new publicly subsidised stadium.
Feature | Open league (e.g. Bundesliga, Premier League) | Franchise league (e.g. NFL, NBA) |
|---|---|---|
Membership | Changes each season through promotion and relegation | Fixed; new teams join only by league decision (expansion) |
Link to place | Strong: clubs rarely move, often founded over a century ago | Weaker: franchises can relocate to richer markets |
Competitive balance | Wealthy clubs often dominate; prize money and broadcasting reward success | Draft and salary cap redistribute talent |
Geographic effect | Small towns can reach the top flight | Teams concentrate in large metropolitan markets |
Historical origins: many clubs were founded in the late 19th century by churches, schools, workplaces and local communities. The English Football League, the world’s first, was founded in 1888 by twelve clubs, six from Lancashire and six from the Midlands, the heartlands of the industrial revolution.
Population and market size: a club needs a threshold population of supporters, so the largest cities usually have the most and the biggest clubs: London had several Premier League clubs in most recent seasons.
Wealth and sponsorship: rich city-regions provide corporate sponsors, hospitality income and higher ticket prices. Some clubs are backed by a company or an individual investor.
Stadium capacity and investment: a large modern stadium raises match-day income; the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany left several clubs with rebuilt stadiums.
Broadcasting income: television money is shared unevenly, rewarding the top division and the most successful clubs, which widens the gap between divisions.
Cumulative causation: success brings more supporters, sponsorship and prize money, which buy better players and more success.
Government and league policy: public money for stadiums and transport, planning permission, and league rules on ownership, licensing and revenue sharing all affect where clubs can grow. In North America, cities compete with subsidies to attract or keep a franchise; in Germany, the 50+1 rule limits outside takeovers.
A club’s fan base is spread over three scales. A local core of season-ticket holders lives near the stadium, showing strong distance decay. A national spread of supporters follows the most successful and famous clubs, often far from their home cities. A global, mostly virtual, following watches on television and social media, and attends when clubs tour Asia or the USA; migrants and their descendants carry loyalty to clubs from their home regions.
Supporter distributions can be measured from season-ticket holders’ postcodes, membership databases, social-media followers and television audiences. Each gives a different picture: a club with a small stadium may have a large global social-media following.
Loyalty also differs between supporters. Most local fans support the club of the place where they or their family grew up, so support is a form of territorial identity: neighbouring clubs divide a city or region between them, and a derby between them is the most intense match of the season. Other supporters, sometimes called "glory supporters", choose a club for its success or fame rather than its location, which is why the most successful clubs have the most dispersed national and global fan bases. Broadcasting and social media have strengthened this second pattern since the 1990s.
Supporter geographies change over time. Clubs in former industrial towns, founded when mills, mines and factories employed most local people, have often lost ground as those industries closed, populations fell and wealthier city clubs attracted the best players. Clubs in large, rich cities and clubs bought by wealthy owners have risen, because they can reach a higher threshold of paying supporters and sponsors. Relegation can also shrink a fan base: fewer televised matches mean less exposure, so younger fans in the club’s region may switch to a top-flight club.
The Bundesliga is Germany’s top football division, founded in 1963 with 16 clubs and played with 18 clubs since 1992–93. In 2026–27 its 18 clubs show three clear clusters: the Rhine–Ruhr region of North Rhine-Westphalia (Borussia Dortmund, Schalke 04, Bayer Leverkusen, 1. FC Köln and Borussia Mönchengladbach), the south-west (Stuttgart, Freiburg, Hoffenheim, Mainz, Frankfurt and SV Elversberg) and Bavaria (Bayern Munich and Augsburg). Only two clubs, RB Leipzig and Union Berlin, are from the former East Germany, where clubs lost players, sponsors and investment after reunification in 1990.
The Ruhr cluster reflects history: its clubs were founded in coal-mining and steel towns, and matches such as the Revierderby between Dortmund and Schalke express local identity. Promotion and relegation keep the map changing: Schalke returned to the top flight for 2026–27, as did SC Paderborn, while SV Elversberg, from Spiesen-Elversberg, a municipality of about 13,000 people in Saarland, reached the Bundesliga for the first time, with a stadium of 10,000 seats. Elversberg shows that open leagues allow small places to rise, but its small threshold population of local supporters makes staying in the top flight difficult.
German clubs keep strong local roots because of the 50+1 rule: club members must hold a majority of the voting rights, which limits takeovers by outside investors. Exceptions were made for clubs long funded by a company, such as Bayer Leverkusen (founded by the Bayer company’s workers) and VfL Wolfsburg (Volkswagen), and for Hoffenheim.
RB Leipzig, founded in 2009 and funded by Red Bull, meets the rule with a very small voting membership, which many supporters of other clubs criticise. The Bundesliga has some of the lowest ticket prices among Europe’s major leagues and large standing areas, such as Dortmund’s Südtribüne, which help to explain its high attendances. Clubs also limit the number of season tickets so that some tickets are left for casual supporters.
YouTubeAverage attendance has more than doubled since the mid-1980s, from 18,399 per match in 1985–86 to a peak of 45,116 in 2011–12, helped by stadiums rebuilt for the 2006 World Cup, low prices and successful marketing. Matches were played behind closed doors in 2020–21 because of COVID-19, and attendances recovered to 41,483 per match in 2025–26. In 2024–25 the Bundesliga’s average (38,656) was the second highest of any football league in the world, after the English Premier League’s 40,421.
The map has changed a great deal since 1963. Clubs from the former East Germany entered the national pyramid after reunification: Dynamo Dresden and Hansa Rostock were placed in the Bundesliga for 1991–92, but Dresden last played in it in 1995, Rostock in 2008 and Energie Cottbus in 2009.
Several clubs with large historic fan bases have fallen into the lower divisions, including 1. FC Kaiserslautern (44 Bundesliga seasons, the last in 2011–12), TSV 1860 Munich (last in 2003–04) and Hertha BSC of Berlin (last in 2022–23). Hamburger SV, a founder member that had never been relegated, went down for the first time in 2018 and returned in 2025–26. These clubs keep large local followings in the lower divisions, which shows that a fan base and a place in the top flight are not the same thing.
Sources: Wikipedia, "Bundesliga", "2026–27 Bundesliga", "Bundesliga attendance", "Premier League" and "Spiesen-Elversberg", 2026.
A festival is an organised event that celebrates music, culture, religion, sport or the arts and draws large numbers of people to a place for a short time. Large festivals turn ordinary places, such as a farm, a riverbank or a city street, into a temporary site of leisure: for a few days the population multiplies, and then it falls back to its normal level.
Many festivals need temporary infrastructure on the same scale as a town: water, toilets, power, roads, medical services and policing.
Type | Examples | Typical setting |
|---|---|---|
Sporting | The London Marathon; stages of the Tour de France through towns and mountain passes | City streets and rural roads, closed for the day |
Musical | Glastonbury (England), Roskilde (Denmark), Coachella (California) | Farmland or open land near large urban populations |
Cultural | Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival | City centres, using existing venues and streets |
Religious | The Kumbh Mela (India), the Hajj (Mecca, Saudi Arabia), Lourdes (France) | Sacred sites: rivers, shrines and holy cities |
Choosing a site for a large festival depends on site factors: the physical and human characteristics of the land itself. A festival for 100,000 or more people needs a combination of these.
Space: hundreds of hectares for stages, camping, car parks and services.
Relief and drainage: gently sloping, well-drained land, so that crowds can see the stages and rain does not turn the site to mud; natural amphitheatres are valuable.
Water supply and services: water for drinking and washing, and space for toilets and waste.
Access: roads that can carry coaches and cars, a railway station within shuttle-bus distance, and a large population within a few hours’ travel.
Ownership and consent: a willing landowner, a licence from the local authority, and the acceptance of local residents.
Tradition and meaning: religious festivals are tied to sacred places that cannot be moved, such as the meeting point of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers at Prayagraj.
When site factors fail, the costs can be severe. At Burning Man in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada in 2023, heavy rain on the dry lake bed turned the site to mud; vehicle movement was stopped and thousands of participants were stranded for days.
A festival brings concentrated benefits and costs to a place, and they fall on different stakeholders: organisers, landowners, residents, local businesses, local councils and police, visitors and environmental groups.
Benefits | Costs | |
|---|---|---|
Economic | Visitor spending in local shops, pubs and accommodation; temporary jobs; contracts for local suppliers; income for landowners; money raised for charities | Leakage of spending to promoters and traders from outside the area; price rises during the event; disruption to normal business; costs of policing and road closures |
Social | Community pride and identity; cultural exchange; volunteering opportunities; funding for local facilities | Noise, traffic congestion and closed roads; crime and drug use; crowd safety risks; residents unable to move freely |
Environmental | Can promote environmental awareness and campaigns; some festivals fund conservation | Waste, abandoned tents and litter; sewage and water demand; damage to grassland and soil; carbon emissions from travel; noise and light affecting wildlife |
The balance depends on the type and scale of the festival, how well it is managed and who has the power to decide. Residents usually have least power but bear many of the costs, so most large festivals now operate under licences that limit their size, hours and noise, and they often fund local projects.
The Maha Kumbh Mela at Prayagraj, India, held from 13 January to 26 February 2025, shows a festival as a temporary city. The authorities built a tent city of about 4,000 ha in 25 sectors on the floodplain at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna, with about 150,000 toilets and about 40,000 police officers. Officials reported more than 660 million bathers over the 45 days, a figure some observers judged implausibly high. A crowd crush on 29 January killed at least 30 people, which showed the risks of concentrating so many people in so small a space.
Sources: Wikipedia, "2025 Prayag Maha Kumbh Mela", 2026.
Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts is held at Worthy Farm, a working dairy farm between the villages of Pilton and Pylle in Somerset, south-west England, about 10 km east of the town of Glastonbury and 5 km south-west of Shepton Mallet. For about five days in late June, a site of about 610 ha (1,500 acres) of fields becomes the temporary home of more than 200,000 people, before returning to farmland.
Worthy Farm has several of the site factors a large festival needs. It covers a large area of gently sloping fields in a shallow valley, which forms a natural amphitheatre around the main stage. A single owner, the Eavis family, controls the land, so there is no need to negotiate with many landowners.
The site is reached by main roads, lies within a few hours of London and the Midlands, and is about 35 km from Bristol, and Castle Cary station on the main line from London Paddington is close enough for shuttle buses. The farm also has two reservoirs holding 2 million litres of water. Its weaknesses are its soils, which turn to deep mud in wet years, and its narrow rural lanes, which congest when hundreds of thousands of people arrive at once.
The first festival, on 19 September 1970, was organised by the farmer Michael Eavis and attracted about 1,500 people, who paid £1 each. It has since grown into one of the largest greenfield music festivals in the world. Growth was not steady. By the late 1990s numbers were difficult to control: in 2000 an estimated 250,000 people attended, although only 100,000 tickets had been sold, because of gatecrashers who climbed the fences. A much stronger perimeter fence was built in 2002, and capacity has since been fixed by licence, rising to 177,000 in 2007 and to 210,000 by 2022.
Year | Attendance or capacity | Notes |
|---|---|---|
1970 | About 1,500 | First festival; tickets £1 |
1971 | About 12,000 | Free festival |
1981 | 18,000 tickets | First profit; £20,000 donated to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament |
1998 | Over 100,000 | First year officially above 100,000 |
2000 | About 250,000 (100,000 tickets sold) | Mass gatecrashing |
2002 | Reduced | Security "superfence" built |
2007 | Capacity 177,000 | Increase of 20,000 |
2022 | Capacity 210,000 | Tickets £373.50 by 2025 |
Sources: Wikipedia, "Glastonbury Festival", citing Glastonbury Festivals Ltd and press reports, 2026.
YouTubeStakeholder | Benefits | Costs |
|---|---|---|
Organisers and the farm | Income from tickets and trading; the farm continues as a dairy business for the rest of the year | High costs of production (about £22 million in 2008), security and clean-up; risk from cancellation |
Charities | Large donations: £5.2 million in the year to March 2024 and about £4.2 million in 2025, with Oxfam, Greenpeace and WaterAid as main beneficiaries | None directly |
Pilton and nearby villages | Funding for local projects; trade for pubs, shops and campsites; local jobs | Congestion, closed roads, noise, litter and trespass during the event; disruption for weeks during build and clear-up |
Visitors | A distinctive cultural experience with music, theatre, circus and campaigning areas | High ticket prices; mud and crowding; long journeys |
The environment | Campaigns for environmental causes; reduced plastic use | Waste and abandoned tents; compacted and damaged grassland; risk of pollution of streams; carbon emissions from travel |
The environmental impacts are the most visible. In 2007 large numbers of tents were left behind, and in 2008 one of the farm’s cows died after swallowing a metal tent peg left in the soil. The festival responded with a "Love the Farm, Leave No Trace" campaign, free biodegradable tent pegs and recycling teams: in 2004, about 300 tonnes of waste were recycled and 110 tonnes composted. Water kiosks were introduced in 2014, and from 2019 the sale of single-use plastic drinks bottles was banned across the site.
Since 1983, large festivals in England have needed a licence from the local authority, which sets the maximum number of people, the hours stages may operate and conditions on noise, safety and traffic. The first licence limited Glastonbury to 30,000 people; in 2014, Mendip District Council issued a licence running until 2024. The 2002 superfence made it possible to enforce the capacity, which improved crowd safety. Visitors are encouraged to travel by public transport: festival trains run from London Paddington to Castle Cary, and coaches run directly to the site from many UK towns.
The most distinctive response is the fallow year. Roughly one year in five, no festival is held, to give the land, the villagers and the surrounding area a rest from the disruption; fallow years have included 1988, 1991, 1996, 2001, 2006, 2012 and 2018, and 2026 is a fallow year, with the festival due to return in 2027. (2020 and 2021 were also cancelled, because of COVID-19.) Fallow years let the grassland recover and reduce the pressure on residents, at the cost of a year without income for local businesses and charities.
Glastonbury is often presented as a well-managed rural festival. Its licence, fence and capacity limits have made it safer and more predictable than in the 1990s; its charity donations and local funding spread benefits beyond the organisers; and its fallow years and plastics ban show a long-term approach to its land. However, the festival still depends on hundreds of thousands of journeys, most by road, so its largest environmental impact, the carbon emissions of travel, lies outside the site itself. For residents of Pilton, the costs are concentrated into a few weeks each year, and views differ on whether local funding and trade make up for them.
Key concept | How the case shows it |
|---|---|
Place | A rural farm with large, sloping fields, one owner and good regional access becomes a site of leisure, but its clay soils and narrow lanes set limits |
Process | Growth from 1,500 to over 200,000 people, the 2000 gatecrashing crisis, and management through licensing, the fence and fallow years |
Power | The Eavis family, the local council (through the licence) and the police decide how large the festival can be; residents and charities are affected by decisions they do not make |
Possibility | Fallow years and plastics bans show possible routes to a more sustainable festival; travel emissions remain the largest challenge |
Sources: Wikipedia, "Glastonbury Festival", 2026; Glastonbury Festivals, glastonburyfestivals.co.uk (charity giving, December 2025).
Explain why Worthy Farm is a suitable site for a festival of over 200,000 people, using physical and human site factors.
Evaluate the effectiveness of fallow years as a way of managing the impacts of the festival.
To what extent do the benefits of Glastonbury Festival for the local community outweigh the costs?
Questions on tourism and sport at the local and national scale appear in Paper 1 as a 10-mark structured question on a stimulus and a choice of 10-mark extended questions. Stimuli are often a desire-line map, a table of survey results, a graph of visitor numbers over time or a photograph of a resort or festival site.
The table shows the results of a survey of 14,000 supporters at a city football stadium, grouped by the distance they travelled from home (hypothetical data).
Distance travelled (km) | 0–5 | 5–10 | 10–20 | 20–50 | Over 50 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Number of supporters | 4,200 | 2,900 | 3,100 | 2,600 | 1,200 |
Extended questions usually ask you to evaluate the impacts of a festival, examine the geography of a league, or discuss the usefulness of Butler’s model.
A tourism hotspot needs both primary touristic resources (features that exist independently, such as scenery and heritage) and secondary touristic resources (facilities built for visitors).
Physical factors provide the attraction; human factors such as accessibility, investment, safety and marketing decide whether it can be used, and cumulative causation helps successful places keep growing.
Urban hotspots rely on heritage, culture and events; rural hotspots on landscapes and wildlife. Tourists consume landscapes, which can change or degrade them.
Butler’s TALC describes a destination’s growth through exploration, involvement, development, consolidation and stagnation, then decline, stabilisation or rejuvenation; it is useful but not predictive, and purpose-built resorts such as Cancún skip its early stages.
Spheres of influence grow with the order of a facility: small for parks and gyms, regional for city stadiums, national and international for national parks. Range, threshold and distance decay explain the differences.
Spheres of influence are measured with user surveys and desire-line maps; real spheres follow transport routes and are distorted by competition and cost.
The geography of a national league reflects history, population, wealth, stadiums and league rules; the Bundesliga clusters in the Rhine–Ruhr and south-west, and its supporters range from local season-ticket holders to global followers.
Festivals are pulsed, temporary sites of leisure with economic, social and environmental costs and benefits; at Glastonbury, licensing, a security fence, a plastics ban and fallow years manage them.
I can distinguish primary and secondary touristic resources with real examples.
I can explain the physical and human factors behind the growth of an urban and a rural hotspot.
I can draw Butler’s model with all its stages and outcomes, apply it to a real place and evaluate it.
I can explain why the spheres of influence of a park, a stadium and a national park differ, using range and threshold.
I can describe how to measure a sphere of influence and interpret a desire-line map and distance-decay data.
I can examine the factors affecting the location of teams and supporters in the Bundesliga.
I can explain the site factors a large festival needs.
I can evaluate the costs and benefits of Glastonbury Festival for different stakeholders.
Site categories: sports that use natural sites (surfing, climbing, skiing, white-water rafting) depend on physical geography; others use purpose-built sites (stadiums, pools, gyms). Some sports use both (indoor climbing walls, artificial ski slopes such as Ski Dubai, artificial wave pools).
Categories overlap and are better seen as continua than as boxes.
Good answers may be well structured (AO4) and may additionally offer a critical evaluation (AO3) which argues that the categories are clearer for some sports than others, and that they depend on place, scale and time. Another approach might be to consider how globalization and technology blur the categories (artificial sites allow "natural" sports in new places; global media make some national sports global). Answers might conclude that the categories are useful generalizations but cannot be fixed.
For 5–6 marks, expect some weakly-evidenced outlining of how sports can be categorized by cost, popularity and/or site.
For 7–8 marks, expect a structured account which includes:
either well-evidenced explanation of the strengths and limitations of the categories, using named sports and places
or a discursive conclusion (or ongoing evaluation) grounded in geographical concepts and/or perspectives.
For 9–10 marks, expect both of these traits.
NB. Maximum [6] if only one of the three categories is discussed.
Marks | Level descriptor |
|---|---|
0 | The response does not reach a standard described by the descriptors below. |
1–2 | Too brief, lists unconnected information, not focused on the question and lacks structure. Knowledge is very general, with large gaps or errors; examples or case studies are missing or only listed. No analysis; terminology is missing or used incorrectly. |
3–4 | Too general, lacks detail, not focused on the question and largely unstructured. Outlines examples, statistics and facts, both relevant and irrelevant, with links to the question only listed. Basic terminology is used, with errors or inconsistently. No critical evaluation of evidence; any conclusion is irrelevant. |
5–6 | Partially addresses the question, with a narrow argument, an unsubstantiated conclusion and limited evaluation. Describes relevant supporting evidence (examples, case studies) and outlines links to the question. The argument repeats one point or covers only part of the question. Other perspectives, or strengths and weaknesses of evidence, are listed. |
7–8 | Addresses the whole question; the analysis is evaluated and the conclusion is relevant but lacks balance. Relevant evidence is described correctly and covers all the main points. The argument is clear but one-sided or unbalanced. Complex terminology is used correctly but not consistently. Other perspectives, or strengths and weaknesses of evidence, are described. |
9–10 | In-depth and specific to the question (topic and command term). Correct, relevant examples, statistics and detail are integrated and their link to the question explained. The argument is balanced, explaining complexity, exceptions and comparisons. Evaluation of evidence and perspectives is well developed, and the conclusion is balanced and aligned with the evidence. Logically structured and easy to follow. |
Examine how place of residence can influence personal participation in sport and tourism.
10 marks
Examine the relative importance of primary and secondary touristic resources in the growth of one or more named rural tourism hotspots.
10 marks