The ’boom’ of rural tourism

In 2022, overnight stays in rural tourism es­tab­lish­ments grew by 16% in Cat­alo­nia, ac­cord­ing to the oc­cu­pancy sur­vey in rural tourism ac­com­mo­da­tion pub­lished in Feb­ru­ary by the Idescat sta­tis­tics in­sti­tute. In terms of where guests came from, the num­ber of Cata­lan tourists grew by 1.4%, while those from the rest of Spain went up by 40.4%. Mean­while, overnight stays by for­eign tourists rose by 150.2% com­pared to a year ago, ob­vi­ously due to the ab­sence of in­ter­na­tional tourism be­cause of the pan­demic travel re­stric­tions in 2021.

Rural tourism in Cat­alo­nia “has fully re­cov­ered; we have re­turned to the oc­cu­pancy rates we had in 2019, or even bet­ter, and we can still grow more,” says Car­les Bar­cons, pres­i­dent of the Con­fed­er­a­tion of Rural Tourism and Agri­tourism of Cat­alo­nia, Tu­ral­cat. Bar­cons in­sists that rural guest houses are “key” to at­tract­ing peo­ple and en­sur­ing the fi­nan­cial vi­a­bil­ity of local busi­nesses. “The peo­ple who stay in rural guest houses are at the same time cus­tomers for the prod­ucts that are pro­duced in the rural farms,” he says. What’s more, the av­er­age rural tourists, mostly fam­i­lies, take ad­van­tage of their stays to get to know the area, its her­itage and tra­di­tions and to enjoy the out­doors and the nat­ural en­vi­ron­ment.

Ac­cord­ing to the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment’s Gen­eral Di­rec­torate of Tourism, 487,766 peo­ple stayed in rural guest houses in 2022, stay­ing 1,259,242 nights, which is 3.18% more than be­fore the pan­demic began.

De­spite being sub­ject to strin­gent health re­stric­tions dur­ing the pan­demic, rural guest houses were among the most used es­tab­lish­ments. “We suf­fered dur­ing the pan­demic but per­haps less than other types of tourist ac­com­mo­da­tion be­cause we are small es­tab­lish­ments, per­haps for a sin­gle fam­ily or group, and peo­ple greatly val­ued being in the mid­dle of na­ture,” says Bar­cons.

Some 86% of peo­ple who use rural guest houses con­sider them­selves eco­tourists, says the lat­est Sus­tain­abil­ity Re­port of the Rural Tourism Ob­ser­va­tory, a re­search pro­ject pro­moted by the Es­capadaRural book­ing por­tal, CETT-UB (the Uni­ver­sity Cen­tre of Tourism, Hos­pi­tal­ity and Gas­tron­omy at­tached to the Uni­ver­sity of Barcelona) and sur­vey spe­cial­ists, Netquest. Ac­cord­ing to this study, sus­tain­abil­ity is one of the most im­por­tant as­pects for rural tourists, and 41% of those peo­ple who con­sider them­selves eco­tourists say that en­joy­ing na­ture re­spon­si­bly is a pri­or­ity when choos­ing a des­ti­na­tion. This study also re­veals that 58% of rural es­tab­lish­ments claim that they al­ready offer a sus­tain­able tourist ac­tiv­ity, while 26% say they are in the process of im­ple­ment­ing one.

The prob­lem that many peo­ple who work in moun­tain areas that are pop­u­lar with tourists, such as Val d’Aran or Vall de Boí, but who can­not find a place to live due to the high rents “is not be­cause of rural guest houses but rather tourist apart­ments,” says Bar­cons. As hap­pens in cities, in rural areas many prop­erty own­ers pre­fer to rent out their apart­ments to tourists for short pe­ri­ods rather than let­ting to long-term ten­ants.

The Tu­ral­cat pres­i­dent also ex­plains that after the pan­demic, when some rural guest houses could no longer man­age, some own­ers “changed the clas­si­fi­ca­tion of the rural guest house to hous­ing for tourist use in the coun­try­side,” which ba­si­cally changes the way the prop­erty is taxed and man­aged. To run a rural guest house, says Bar­cons, “the owner must be self-em­ployed and live in or next to the mu­nic­i­pal­ity in which the prop­erty is lo­cated. How­ever, the owner of a house for tourist use can live else­where and does not need to be self-em­ployed.”

In Cat­alo­nia, there are more than 2,500 rural tourism es­tab­lish­ments that be­tween them offer al­most 21,000 places, ac­cord­ing to the Cata­lan tourism agency. These prop­er­ties are of dif­fer­ent types, from houses lo­cated in vil­lages to iso­lated farm­houses. In the case of farm­houses, often the owner is a pro­fes­sional farmer who ob­tains their main rev­enue from grow­ing crops, forestry, or rais­ing live­stock, but at the same time hosts guests who can com­ple­ment their stay with the ex­pe­ri­ence of tak­ing part in the daily life of the farm.

An­other cat­e­gory of rural ac­com­mo­da­tion is prop­erty in which the owner is not obliged to ob­tain farm­ing rev­enue. Ac­cord­ing to the tourism agency, under this cat­e­gory there are four types of rural ac­com­mo­da­tion: masia (a farm­house lo­cated out­side the town that the guests share with the own­ers), masove­ria (a de­tached house out­side town for the ex­clu­sive use of the guests), casa de poble (a shared house in a vil­lage) and casa de poble in­de­pen­dent (a house in a vil­lage ex­clu­sively for guests).

Fea­ture Tourism