Abstract
Within the vibrant and expanding body of tourism scholarship around peripheral regions, there are
limited geographical studies on locational issues. Notwithstanding a substantive contribution by
geographers to understanding a cross-section of tourism issues the need exists to ‘re-spatialize’ our
understanding of tourism patterns in peripheral areas. It is against this backdrop that the purpose of this
paper is to build upon recent analyses of South Africa’s tourism space economy and investigate the
location of ‘less visited tourism spaces’ in the country. Situated within an international literature on
peripheral tourism this analysis reviews a range of indicators concerning less visited tourism spaces in
South Africa. The focus is explicitly upon identifying the most marginal and in many respects most ‘off
the tourism map’ local municipalities in South Africa as a counterpoint to previous works that identify
across a range of similar indicators the most significant and leading spaces for tourism development.
Overall, the paper represents a contribution both to an evolving South African scholarship on tourism
geography, as well as to an expanding international literature around peripheral tourism spaces.