Tourism is the subject of many researches in geography. In this general context, our thesis deals with this phenomenon by investing the field of representations created by tourism, analyzing and interpreting the image of the Croatian tourist destination (dreamed image, stereotypical tourist image or promoted image – this last one created by the official Croatian organizations). The Croatian destination is, indeed, well known since the end of the war that raged in the former Yugoslavia (1991-1998): for a decade, it is actually the scene of an important tourism development. We want to examine the phenomenon of tourism crisis, identifying the factors that justify this crisis and those that have allowed tourism to be reactivated and, in particular, showing the impacts of tourism promotion after having defined its actors and its purposes.For this purpose, a methodological framework has been determined (first part): with a classic hypothetical-deductive reasoning, we have compared the tourism facts (analyzed with statistics, observations or surveys) with the images created by the Croatian tourism promotion (especially with the promotional materials of the Croatian Tourist Board but also with many guides and articles about Croatia). So we built our study on the basis of empirical observations, trying to prove or disprove our ideas, including the idea that the marketing image is a manipulated one. The main point of our research is to understand how the tourism image of Croatia is created. This raises inevitably the question of the adequacy between the reality and what is said about it. We want to explain that the principle of the dialectic between representation and reality - Croatian tourism - is not only dependent on business or marketing case: other logics appear, especially using the field of identity construction. With such a way of thinking, we can demonstrate that the promoted image is, consciously or not, exploited.To analyze the image, a perfect knowledge of tourism (or of scientifically established facts) is a preliminary and essential approach. This unavoidable time of the analysis must allow to know the facts and not only the representations. So the second part of our analysis is dedicated to the exploitation of statistical facts, to the tourism phenomenon in terms of flows but also of forms of tourism. We show that the tourism crisis, more structural than cyclical (that is to say, more related to the transition from a socialist to a market economy at the end of the war in Yugoslavia) was quickly overwhelmed because of the customers (mainly Europeans) and because of well-known sea resorts. This quick tourism development may be explained by many factors (Part three): the most traditional arguments are highlighted (a Mediterranean climate, high accommodation capacities on the coast, the proximity of the European customers). But, contrary to a preconceived idea that is often relayed by the media, we insist on the place and on the role of the history of tourism development in the region: according to us, the tourism in Croatia (in terms of infrastructure or of customers) is nowadays, the result of previous periods (late nineteenth century and Yugoslav period) [...]
