Agritourism – From Additional Income to Livelihood Strategy and Rural Development

During the Romantic period, the Franconian Jura in northern Bavaria, Germany, was discovered as an attractive landscape with aesthetic value. The diversified cultural landscape (rocks, forests, and farmland) and its seasonal variations in land cover are appreciated by tourists to this day, albeit in different form and use made of the scenic beauty. With the modernization and restructuring of agriculture in the 1970s, farming families increasingly seized the opportunity to play a role in rural tourism. In the last three decades, offering holidays on the farm as well as direct sales of their own valueadded farms' products have provided additional alternative incomes.