Abstract & Overview
The ''cultural heritage'' concept has continuously enriched itself, thus including several fields in its current meaning.A first major distinction is the one of the fields of tangible and intangible heritage.Our research work has shown us that there is a whole system of values, profiles and different contents that can determine the quality of a cultural and natural asset with economic and especially tourist importance.Each country has chosen a smaller or bigger set of criteria to appraise those assets that can be officially classified from the culture and nature fields.Also, the evaluation of the heritage determines the protection and conservation processes and starts from the types of values represented by the items, natural and cultural sites or the nonphysical heritage elements.The methodological difficulties related to the heritage evaluation arise exactly from the complex nature of these values (cultural, esthetical, political, economic) which are not determined once for all but they fluctuate in time, being influenced by contextual factors like economic or social forces, cultural trends.