Presentation of Rafael Vallejo Pousada’s book at the University of Brescia

At the beginning of the 1960s, Spain was among the leading countries in the world tourism market, in terms of visitors and income. This fact, forged in just a few years, had undoubted political, economic, sociological and environmental repercussions at the national and provincial levels, where this mass phenomenon was most successful. Tourism was incorporated into the great national debates during Franco’s dictatorship.

This book studies the process that took Spain from the condition of “tourism country”, a lagging behind, aspiring to be a tourist country, when the Patronato Nacional del Turismo was created, institutionalizing the tourist policy in 1928, to the condition of “tourist country”, at the beginning of the 1960s.

It does so by addressing four levels. That of tourism administration, with a novel focus on provincial tourism administration. The economy of tourism and how, between 1955 and 1962, the change in the Spanish tourism model took place, with a predominance of inbound tourism, and how an economic model highly dependent on the income from inbound tourism was configured, in comparison with other leading tourist countries such as Italy. That of the main agents of the Spanish tourism system: the aforementioned administration with its tourism policy and the tourism companies. These are studied in unprecedented detail in a work of this type: travel agencies, the hotel industry and the extra-hotel offer (campsites, bungalows, urbanizations and tourist apartments), which were ahead of the traditional and modern hotel industry of those years, when Manuel Fraga replaced Gabriel Arias in the Ministry of Information and Tourism in 1962.