Health tourism and health promotion at the coast

In this chapter we discuss the role of the coast in health tourism and for health promotion. In the rst section an overview is given of the recent literature regarding the coast as a therapeutic landscape and health eects of the coast; in the second section a short genealogy is given on the developments of coastal health tourism; in the third section coastal health tourism is framed in the broader debate on medicalisation, lifestyle and consumerism and the growing body culture. In the next section a case study is presented of the construction of the province of Zeeland in the Netherlands into a ‘healthy region’, in which health tourism is an essential part. We conclude with some recommendations, both for further research and for the tourist industry