Developing Senior Tourism in Remote Regions (TOURAGE)

The Diputación de Granada (County Council of Granada) is a Local Public Administration, which is the Local Government of the Province of Granada that represents and renders services to 168 municipalities: Coordinating municipal services; legal, economic and technical assistance to town councils; rendering public services with a supramunicipal or local nature; encouraging and administering particular interests of the province.

The County Council closely works in cooperation with municipalities and their associations, social agents, NGO’s, enterprises…through several kinds of agreements, networking and projects. Its staff is around 1.732 people. The Delegation of Provincial Development and Employment is the department of the County Council devoted to promote local development: European projects, training and employment, territorial observatory of employment, territorial social responsibility.

The Province of Granada, with a population of almost 1 million inhabitants, is located in the South East area of the Region of Andalusia – Spain. Its main characteristics are: great territorial imbalances, geographical diversity, rural character, progressive ageing of population, high importance of tertiary sector and predominance of microenterprises.

The rural tourism sector has big importance for economy of Granada. The number of rural accommodations had increased spectacularly during last decades. But it still has several problems to sort out linked to their quality and viability. Some of these difficulties have meant that rural tourism has not benefited from the increase of the tourist visits made by Third Age population.

TOURAGE will provide us with references of experiences to tackle this challenge. At the same time we will be able to transfer project results to our territory as we closely work with our municipalities.

We implement several activities to promote rural tourism as one important resource for the development of territory: Assistance to entrepreneurs and business; Promotion of public-private cooperation in the tourism sector; Handbook of management of rural accommodations; technical assistance to town councils in fitting out of municipal owned-buildings; training activities linked to the sector.

Besides we have implemented several European projects linked to the sector, mainly in the framework of INTERREG and other programmes of the ERFD