Spain’s tourism moving inland
Rural and green travel is the new frontier for Spain’s tourism industry as it tries to break free from its dependence on mass seaside travel and fight off stiff competition from cheaper Mediterranean rivals.
Foreign visitors accounted for just 5 percent of all tourists who stayed at a rural home in the country in 2014.
Today they make up 20 percent, according to the tourism ministry, a share the government wants to rise to 35 percent.
“We must have done something right,” the ministry’s director for sustainable tourism, Ricardo Blanco, said at the five-day Fitur tourism trade fair in Madrid which wraps up Sunday.
Spain, the world’s second-most visited country after France, hit a record for tourist arrivals for the seventh year in a row last year, with nearly 84 million foreign visitors.
But the big resorts which started out in the 1960s along the country’s southern coastline saw profits fall by 0.7 percent as sunseekers from northern Europe returned to less expensive destinations in Turkey, Tunisia and Egypt which they had shunned for years due to security concerns.
Related Posts