EL TURISTA CULTURAL EXTRANJERO DE MUSEOS EN LA CIUDAD DE CUENCA-ECUADOR

Within the framework of cultural tourism in Ecuador, the article addresses a little-studied topic: the particularities of foreign cultural tourists from museums in the city of Cuenca, their sociodemographic characteristics, evolution of the visits and thematic preferences according to the nationality of the visitor in such a way that these tourists can be identified and characterized, which offers practical consequences for the museums in the city. The research follows a mixed paradigm and it is nourished by the analysis of scientific papers, official data from the Ministry of Tourism of Ecuador and the Visit Book of the museums analyzed that corresponds to the years 2016, 2017 and 2018. The quantitative data related to the visits of the cultural tourist to museums are interpreted from the concepts related to cultural tourism. With the previous corpus, the analysis and comparison of the information obtained was carried out by applying descriptive statistics tools and the SPSS version 23 program. The research establishes the potential demands of the public made up of foreign cultural tourists from museums in Cuenca and the challenges to improve the museography, guidance and attention, specifically of those who are involved with the museum institution and cultural tourism.