In 1986, a town in western Asturias marked the founding milestone of Spanish rural tourism.
Forty years ago Taramundi became, with the opening of the Hotel La Rectoral as an emblem, the nucleus that would inaugurate Spanish rural tourism. At that time few people were able to anticipate the future potential of tourism for rural areas. This visionary condition was even greater for Asturias, a land whose tourist vocation was yet to be discovered.
The Government of the Principality of Asturias was committed to leading a project destined to become a model for transforming the economic bases of a rural area and to provide a future for many territories. The place chosen was Taramundi, a locality where tourism was absolutely non-existent. It was there that a plan would begin that would highlight the most outstanding resources of our Community: landscape, gastronomy and countryside.
Of course, at that time it was a risky bet to convert an old rectory in a small village far from the big tourist centres into a four-star hotel. Defining the value and recovering the rural architecture to provide accommodation, designing hiking routes, recovering ethnographic devices such as the Mazo de Teixois as a museum centre, recovering, with the help of the artisan Pilar Quintana, the work on the low-warp loom, opening to tourism the old workshops of the iron craftsmen who made knives and razors by hand in the same way as centuries ago... All this was the pioneering project that was born in Taramundi, promoting the first experiences of rural tourism in the whole country.
In the following decades, following the Taramundi model, thousands of rural accommodation initiatives were developed all over Spain.
This 40th anniversary is a way of recognising all that it has meant and continues to mean for Spanish tourism. For this reason, there will be different initiatives that will be developed throughout the year, among which the Rural Tourism Discount Vouchers 2026 stand out, which will allow you to enjoy everything that this modality represents and offers in enormously advantageous conditions.