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Abstract Cultural heritage protects and safeguards national and local pride and identity. It also serves to remind people of their shared past and present. Additionally, it improves wellbeing: People who have a particular area they feel particularly attached to report “greater levels of well-being and life satisfaction”. Therefore, the importance of cultural heritage sites is major and must be paid attention to. Besides the spiritual significance of cultural heritage, it has a major and extremely physical importance for all countries and societies as it has a huge potential to help such communities achieve their social, economic, and environmental goals. Due to the importance of Cultural heritage sites and what they present as these sites resembles a national treasure for any country, the thesis discusses the importance of those sites as tourist destinations and how to sustainably develop them making full use of their economic, social, and environmental potentials. The thesis starts by providing general definitions and descriptions for the basic terms of Culture, Heritage and their relation and linkage through tourism under the term “Cultural Heritage Tourism”. The research then adequately clarifies the concept of development of the “Cultural Heritage Sites” explaining the challenges and impacts of the development process of those sites highlighting the negative impacts and shedding the light on the importance of the concept of sustainability in the tourism development process of those sites and its role in avoiding and eliminating those negative impacts. The researcher then studies the concept of “Sustainable Development” and the concept of “Sustainable Tourism” trying to unfold the linkage between them under the umbrella of “Sustainable Tourism Development”. Afterwards different case studies of cultural heritage sites that are developed as tourist destinations are studied and analyzed to clarify to what extent the development strategy of each of them achieved the term of “Sustainable Tourism Development” which will help the researcher attain the straightforward, optimum efficient approach for achieving sustainable tourism development strategy for cultural heritage sites. |