Professor of Tourism
Field: Human Geography
Bachelor of Arts (Geography and History) from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, with the fifth year studied at the University of Durham in England thanks to an Erasmus scholarship program. Master’s degree in Leisure and Tourism Studies from the University of Ghent (Flanders, Belgium). PhD in Geography from the University of Girona (recognized by the University of Sao Paulo). Associate Professor and member of the Multidisciplinary Research Laboratory in Tourism (LMRT).
Since 1998 he has taught at the University of Girona’s Faculty of Tourism, from 2002 onwards working on postgraduate studies, teaching on the European Master’s in Tourism Management (the European Union’s only Erasmus Mundus program in tourism), the Master’s in Tourism Management and Planning (which he was also coordinator of for two years) and the Master’s in Cultural Tourism (the only Master’s program in this field in Spain, and which he has been coordinator of since 2014). He was the Dean of the University of Girona’s Faculty of Tourism (the first in Catalonia and Spain) for two terms, from 2004 to 2012.
He has also taught at the University of Havana (Cuba), the National University of Costa Rica, Matej Bel University (Slovakia), Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia), Sichuan University (Chengdu, China), Sun Yat-sen University (Guangzhou, China) and several public and private universities in Brazil (UNIMEP, UNESP, USP-EACH, PUC-MINAS, UFAL, UFPA and UFVJM). In recent years he has led several Interuniversity Cooperation Projects (PCI) run by the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation and Development (AECID) and the University of Havana, the National University of Costa Rica, the Methodist University of Piracicaba, the Federal University of Alagoas (UFAL), Sao Paulo State University (UNESP), the Federal University of Pará in Brazil and Addis Ababa University on rural tourism, eco-tourism, tourism and archeology and tourism as a tool for sustainable economic development. He also worked for the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) as an external assessor on the project Promoting Sustainable Tourism in Lower San Francisco (Alagoas, Brazil) during the 2014-15 academic year.
He has published articles in leading academic journals on tourism with the highest impact factor in the field of tourism (Tourism, Leisure and Hospitality Management), and all ranked in the first quartile of the Journal Citation Report (JCR): Annals of Tourism Research, Tourism Management and Journal of Sustainable Tourism. He has also published articles in the following journals: Estudios Turísticos, Estudios y Perspectivas en Turismo, Papers de Turisme, Turismo & Sociedade, Estudios Geográficos, etc. He is co-editor of the Revista Iberoamericana de Turismo (RITUR), a joint initiative by the University of Girona and UFAL, and funded by AECID.
Finally, he was a member of the Costa Brava Girona Tourism Board from 2004 to 2012.