Hiking Tourism in Spain: Origins, Issues and Transformations

María Belén Gómez-Martín

doi:10.3390/su11133619

Abstract

In Spain, hiking is an activity that involves following paths, which may or may not be signposted, on foot, for sporting and cultural purposes. In the country as a whole, although with important regional variations, hiking has traditionally been linked to mountaineering and rambling clubs. However, at the beginning of the 1990s this activity became much more widely popular, reaching beyond the more limited sphere within which the pioneers of hiking in Spain had acted. Hiking stopped being just a sporting and cultural activity and also became a form of tourism and leisure, coinciding with the emergence and consolidation of what have become known as alternative forms of tourism. In this context of change, hiking tourism has gradually evolved over the years into a strategic option for development in many territories. This article presents the most important aspects of this transformation: the changes in the territorial model for the management of the paths on which the creation of hiking tourism products is based; the fact that in the design of routes more consideration is being given to the differential characteristics of tourist demand for hiking; the adaptation of the accommodation, restaurant facilities and the main specific services associated with it; and the emergence and engagement of new stakeholders in the processes of planning, distribution and communication of this activity.

Highlights

In Spain, hiking is generally defined as an activity that involves following paths, which may or may not be signposted, on foot, for sporting and cultural purposes
The first and most important factor is the territorial model of management of hiking paths on which the creation of the hiking tourism offering and/or products is based
From the Creation of Tourism Products Based on Prioritized Itineraries to the Proposal of Networks for Walking In Spain, the fact that rambling was a precursor of hiking tourism helps explain why from the beginning of the 1990s until well into the first decade of the 21st-century the routes intended for hiking tourism were mainly conceived as proposals for prioritized itineraries

Summary

Introduction

In Spain, hiking (senderismo) is generally defined as an activity that involves following paths, which may or may not be signposted, on foot, for sporting and cultural purposes. The subject of this article is hiking tourism in Spain, a tourist and leisure activity conducted on foot along signposted, preferably historical, paths, that run through natural/rural countryside This open-air, outdoor activity is amongst the most demanded by the tourists and day-trippers who visit mountain areas and protected natural spaces [5,6,7], as happens in other countries [8,9,10,11,12,13]. It is not limited to a single point or space and instead takes place in motion across the territory [14,15,16] This is why the spatial and geographic dimension of the travel experience goes far beyond most other kinds of tourism in which the journey is a means to an end rather than an end in itself

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