Rural and green travel is the new motto for Spain’s tourism industry as it tries to change its dependence on mass seaside travel, fighting off stiff competition from cheaper Mediterranean rivals.
Foreign visitors accounted for just five percent of all tourists staying at a rural home in Spain in 2014.
But now, they make up 20 percent, according to the Spanish tourism ministry, and the government aims to rise that share to 35 percent.
“We must have done something right,” said the ministry’s director for sustainable tourism, Ricardo Blanco, during the five-day FITUR tourism trade fair in Madrid.
Last year, Spain, the world’s second-most visited country after France, saw a record of tourist arrivals for the seventh year consecutively, with almost 84 million foreign visitors.
Foreign tourism grew by “almost double digits” in Spain’s green northern coast, and did well in the arid and underpopulated center which is home to medieval architecture.
In the northern Asturias region, where a moist climate caters to rich forests and vegetation, the government’s efforts have “started to bear fruit”, said the regional government’s deputy tourism minister Graciela Blanco. The region, long popular with Spaniards, welcomed a record 400,000 foreign visitors in 2019.
The scenario is alike in the neighboring north-western region of Galicia where the number of foreign tourists has nearly doubled over the past ten years.
