Cheese recently acquired a major role as a tourist attraction, cheese tourism appearing in parallel to the increasing regional impact of food tourism practices. As a means of valuing local produce, recovering cultural heritage and appreciating natural landscapes, cheese making became a significant activity for community development, diversification and innovation in rural areas. Here, tourism is an innovation process that allows the economic survival of local small agri-food companies. Drawing from phenomenological ethnographic fieldwork based on participatory observation, this research discusses the mutual relations between the innovative processes of artisanal cheese sector and food tourism in rural Catalonia. Results provide evidence on how innovation occurs through milk and cheese production in rural environments as, from their role as primary economic activities, they progressively became a crucial actor within the tourism industry. This research contributes to the understanding of the processes of diversification and innovation in rural and natural environments, based on the specific case of artisanal cheese making in the Catalan Pyrenees. In this sense, gastronomic tourism practices confirm the entrepreneurial role of local producers in economic and tourist development.

This paper reviews the development of greenways/car-free trails as an alternative environmentally friendly communication system and assesses their strengths and weaknesses. It gives the results of a questionnaire survey of 1261 users along a 106-km greenway in Spain linking the Pyrenees with the Mediterranean Sea. Unlike previous studies, sampling was random and unequal probabilities of selection were properly accounted for. The results show a complex range of user profiles, tourist and non-tourist, their perceptions of the trail and some of the direct and indirect impacts of the greenway on the communities through which it passes. Management recommendations flowing from the survey are presented with the aim of increasing the use of accommodation services and businesses in the towns and villages near the greenway and helping create a more sustainable tourism system. The paper illustrates the potential importance of greenways in a future low-carbon tourism strategy adapting to climate change.

Since hosting the Olympics in 1992, Barcelona has enjoyed a privileged position in the competitive city rankings, with a dizzying growth in tourist numbers and a tourism industry that considers itself a frontrunner in economic development, resilient to crises while generating jobs and wealth. In recent years, however, this thriving sector and model city have been threatened by a phenomenon that has been labelled tourism-phobia. The negative impacts of tourism are beginning to create a general malaise in the city, which translates into a hatred of tourism and/or the tourist. Various social movements now hold protests and demonstrations calling for a decrease in tourism and the municipal administration itself has established forms of control over the sector. Barcelona has become a laboratory for pioneering measures, political programmes and radical management strategies to build a new model of tourist city. Taking Michel Foucault’s theory as a basis, this paper analyses how the multi-actor device of tourism-phobia that makes up the tourist city has been constructed, identifying the relevant power networks and their discourses. The elements involved in the ‘tourism-phobic Barcelona’ scenario are characterized in order to better understand the obstacles to achieving sustainable tourism linked to the millennium goals.