Approach to mycological tourism from the perspective of rural capital. Comparative analysis in central Mexico

Abstract

Rural tourism occupies a fundamental place in the productive restructuring of the countryside, being a transversal strategy of rural economic diversification, based on the principles of multi-functionality and pluriactivity. The development of some tourism modalities, such as mycological tourism, depends on the articulation of specific resources and services that make up the rural capital of the territories. This paper aimed to identify the importance of rural capital in the processes of tourist use of mycological resources as development strategie. With an ethnographic ap-proach, focused on the social actor, a comparative analysis was carried out on the interactions between the different forms of rural capital in the conformation two of mycological tourism offers. It is concluded that the quantity and distribution of rural capital produce different trajectories concerning the tourist appropriation of mycological resources, depending on the configuration of each territory.