Unused industrial sites recovered for tourism in Spain have become one of the most visible aspects of tourist trends for several decades. Their basically local dimension has managed to boost the economy in the areas hit in the past by deindustrialization, unemployment, and environmental damage. Industrial heritage tourism is based on innovative aid projects that tend to merge the local or regional authorities' and the local population's participation with sustainable resource management models.
The method used is qualitative. The literature on industrial heritage and tourism has been reviewed to update the state of the art, several key concepts have been applied (tourism, industrial heritage, territory and landscape) to reinforce explanations in particular contexts, and different reuse plans and projects have been consulted. Using several different criteria, 16 case studies have been selected, on which intensive field work has been carried out.
The global vision offered of industrial heritage in Spain has a clearly geographical interpretive character, in line with the so-called "territorial culture". Industrialization's legacy is interpreted as a basic element of any landscape and as a unique, practically unrepeatable social product, due to the specific and occasional combination of very distinct aspects. We consider that the tourist use of industrial elements has to do with the preservation of local communities' identity, a consideration that, within the most recent epistemological context of geographical science, allows us to assert that local issues matter just as much as global issues, though without contrasting but instead interrelating the two spatial scales.
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