Rural Culinary Tourism in Southern Europe: Emerging Educational Needs of a Growing Sector

Rural culinary tourism is a growing sector in European tourism and is a key resource for rural development, in particular in Southern Europe. The boom of the sector that followed the COVID-19 pandemic, however, poses important questions concerning the actual capacity of local actors to grasp this opportunity. The paper investigates the main trends in rural tourism in Southern Europe and the specific educational needs entrepreneurs express based on extensive research conducted in seven Southern European countries (France, Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey) within the Erasmus + project “The European Network for the Promotion of Culinary and Proximity Tourism in Rural Areas” in 2022. Specifically, the research was conducted through focus group discussions with professionals and stakeholders of the project carried out in the target countries involving 76 respondents. Based on the data collected, this paper indicates a way forward for the new gastronomes to understand this sector and invest their professionality in it.