Travel Trends: Culinary Tourism

Posted by Barbara Rogers Feb 26, 2007

Italy tops the list, with different cuisines in each region and towns famed for their special ingredient or dish. Say Alba and white truffles come to mind. Say Parma and it’s the outstanding hams. Gorgonzola, Taleggio and other towns have given their names to cheeses made there, and wines usually take on the names of the locality: Valpolicella, Soave, Chianti.

Food festivals are everywhere, such as the Alba’s White Truffle Fair, Turin’s Salon de Gusto in October, Perugia’s EuroChocolate fair, the rice festival in Mantova, and perhaps the most unusual, Camogli’s Sagra del Pesce, when thousands of sardines are fried in giant pans more than eight feet in diameter. Visitors plan their vacations around the dates of these gustatory celebrations.

Still others spend a week or weekend learning to cook at culinary schools and programs, such as those in a number of Tuscan villas, or studying wines at Slow Food’s University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo.

But Italy doesn’t have a monopoly on culinary tourism and foody travel. The annual saffron harvest brings crowds to Consuegra, near Toledo in Spain, and A Taste of Spain offers tours that combine this festival with the harvest of paprika peppers in the Extremadura.

In Cyprus travelers can live in a small agricultural village, in smartly-restored apartments, as they learn the secrets of making the local Halloumi cheese, how to cure olives and other local specialties. In Portugal, the town of Santarem in the heart of the agricultural region, hosts a giant annual food festival that tourists rarely hear about.

In fact, it’s hard to visit southern Europe without stumbling onto a food festival or event, so if you love food, pack your appetite and know that Culinary Tourism is the hippest travel trend