Spain's tourism models in the first third of the twentieth century

The remarkable emergence of the service sector to dominate the modern economy is the most outstanding consequence of the Industrial Revolution in the first third of the twentieth century. With it appeared a new social class which made an active contribution to the sector’s growth by opting for a new kind of tourist provision which was very different from traditional models, above all holidays in Spain. In the first third of the twentieth century, tourism in Spain was characterised by a variety of coexisting business models. On the one hand, business travellers went to the major cities. On the other hand, there was holiday travel, which can be broken down into three categories: the first type is traditional leisure-based tourism of an aristocratic cast, which dominated in the north, in the region of the Bay of Biscay, while the second type involves foreigners visiting the mythic south of Andalusia: Granada, Malaga, Seville and Cordoba. The third and final type, which appeared on the island of Majorca shortly after World War I, is the most modern, based on international colonial maritime traffic and cruise liners.