“For numerous towns, and particularly those in rural areas, the NPS sites are the main reason people are visiting, which leads to $1.3 billion in spending and more than 20,000 jobs statewide.” With 18.2 million visitors annually across 14 different sites, “It’s impossible to overstate the impact these sites have on all sorts of communities across our state,” he said. North Carolina, which is home to the most popular national park and the second most popular park site, “gets more National Park Service site visitors than any state other than California,” said Wit Tuttell, Director of Visit North Carolina. The lodging sector saw the biggest benefits, with $6.8 billion in economic output, while restaurants saw $4 billion in economic output. Visitors to the national park sites spent a estimated $20.2 billion in local gateway regions in 2018, according to a May 2019 report (PDF) by the park service, which translated into 329,000 jobs, $13.6 billion in labor income, $23.4 billion in value added, and $40.1 billion in economic output. The park service also released rankings on all the sites it oversees, which includes parkways, seashores, lakeshores, battlefields and memorials. “With at least one located in every state, national parks offer nearby history, culture and adventure.”Īmong those 419 sites covering more than 85 million acres in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and several US territories, only 62 are national parks.
“The 419 parks in the national park system provide a vast array of opportunities for recreation and inspiration for visitors of all ages,” said National Park Service Deputy Director David Vela. “The numbers once again affirm that Americans and visitors from around the world love the natural, cultural and historic experience provided by our nation’s national parks,” said Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt in a press release. (The park service wasn’t even created until 1916.) More than 327 million people visited NPS sites last year, a 2.9% increase from 2018, and the third highest number since record keeping began in 1904. Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which attracted 12.5 million visitors last year, topped the National Park Service’s 2019 list of most popular national parks, the park service reported. Straddling the North Carolina-Tennessee border, the most popular national park in the United States covers 800 square miles in the Southern Appalachian Mountains and is home to lovely flora and fauna and a large section of the Appalachian Trail. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated.
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