Turismo y agricultura: una relación lógica desde la concepción de la gastronomía como un proceso integral

The present work contains partial results of an investigation on the proposal of a tourist and gastronomic route in Santander, Colombia. The research focused on analyzing the link between tourism and agriculture as a factor that could generate a positive influence on the sustainability of the countryside, on the development of agricultural and tourist production in Santander. From the methodological point of view, it is a non-experimental investigation, based on the direct observation of reality, coupled with the analysis of descriptive aspects from a set of semi-structured interviews carried out with farmers in the area under study. The study emphasized on showing that this relationship could be possible from the application of some of the modalities of rural, community, gastronomic or agri-food tourism, where the concept of gastronomy integrates all the actors that are part of the processes of production, transformation and consumption of food produced in the field. From this proposal, it was possible to observe that there is a close relationship between tourism and agriculture, which allows us to think of a gastronomic rural tourism that has as its purpose, to generate sustainable alternatives for economic and social development in rural areas. The main conclusions underline the trend observed worldwide, in which gastronomy is incorporated as a fundamental part of the tourism-agriculture relationship, to find mechanisms that promote tourism activity while strengthening the rural economy and contributing to the maintenance of agricultural spaces rural as places of recreation, leisure and agricultural production. Thus, they can manage sustainable tourism projects where food is part of the tourist attraction, managed by the community itself. In addition to providing the peasant with other means of subsistence complementary to their agricultural work, which at the same time constitute a recognition of the valuable contribution they make to the gastronomic process of the locality and adapt to the needs of the current tourist.