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This paper aims to analyse the implications in terms of economic promotion and local development that ensue from the implementation of a strategy of agrarian branding in five municipalities in the Baixa Tordera region (Catalonia, Spain).

The research follows a case study logic. First, five focus groups were designed and distributed by sectors of activity. Second, six in-depth interviews were scheduled with opinion leaders from the region. Finally, a survey open to all inhabitants was set up on the town councils’ websites.

The brand understood as a device removed from the connotations of indiscriminate marketing should guarantee the following elements in its deployment and implementation: knowledge, recognition, complicity, development and denomination of origin.

This research contributes to improve the management models of agrarian spaces, but it also helps expand the research background on studies on agrarian branding.

The place brand must become something close to a denomination of origin that, informally, invites us to define the future of this agrarian area. It therefore also affects the complexity of the planning and development of this area which, from now on, must necessarily be supramunicipal. In this way, the brand needs to offer a holistic vision of the region to all the agents that work in the strategic and urban planning of the five municipalities under study.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an initial, exploratory and tentative theoretical construct related to the current consumption of landscape as a key symbolic and physical element in territorial representation and evocation, and for the deployment of place branding strategy. It constructs a line of argument to support what shall be referred to as “landscape branding”, that is, the paradigmatic role of landscape in place branding. It is, therefore, of interest to define the value of landscape as a social and cultural construction, which is why the paper awards importance to the specific analysis of their capacity for visual and/or aesthetic evocation within the context of a general branding strategy for geographical spaces.

To develop a sufficient proposal for sustaining “a theory of landscape branding”, the paper deploys a meta-analysis, that is, an extensive review and interpretation of the literature related to visual landscape and place branding, to propose a tentative initial approach to landscape-infused place branding theory.

The relationship existing between landscape images and texts and their possible situating and subsequent interpreting within the context of the political, cultural and economic logics of contemporary society give rise to a renewed analytical framework for cultural geographies (Wylie, 2007). At this point, place branding becomes a recurring argument for the consumption of carefully staged places, representing, to use Scott’s terms (2014), the arrival of a cognitive-cultural capitalism characteristic of post-Fordism.

From a practical perspective, the landscape branding approach provides several benefits. First of all, regardless of the fact that many commentators have argued that logos, slogans and advertising campaigns are relatively ineffective in place branding, practitioners still seem to be focussed on these visual design and advertising tools. The landscape branding approach facilitates an identity-focussed perspective that reconfirms the importance of linking reality with perception and hence reinforces the need to link place branding to policy-making, infrastructure and events.

Landscapes’ imageability facilitates visual storytelling and the creation of attractive symbolic actions (e.g. outdoor events/arts in attractive landscape and augmented reality or landscaping itself). This is the type of imaginative content that people easily share in social media. And, of course, landscape branding reiterated the importance of experience. If policymakers and publics alike understand this considerable symbolic value of landscape, it might convince them to preserve it and, hence, contribute to sustainability and quality of life.

The novelty lies not in the familiar use of visual landscape resources to promote places, but in the carefully orchestrated construction of gazes, angles, representations, narratives and interpretations characteristic of geographic space, which somehow hijack the spontaneous gaze to take it to a certain place. Everything is perfectly premeditated. According to this, the visual landscape represents a critical point as a way of seeing the essence of places through a place branding strategy. In this sense, that place branding which finds in visual landscape a definitive argument for the projection of aspirational places imposes a new “way of seeing” places and landscape based on a highly visual story with which to make a particular place desirable, not only for tourism promotion purposes but also with the intention of capturing talent, infrastructures and investment, among other objectives.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the tourist landscape as represented in Turisme de Barcelona’s YouTube tourism promotional videos, looking at the landscape’s tangible locations, symbolic and tourist assets and the protagonists in an effort to interpret its storytelling in an overtourism context.

The mixed methodology is based on a visual content analysis of promotional videos posted on the official Barcelona tourism YouTube channel. Quantitative data analysis about the assets and their localization was completed with a qualitative assessment of the way these assets are displayed to unveil the narrative they convey.

The results highlight that Barcelona’s projected image is mainly based on tangible heritage (especially monuments), its recognizable cityscape and its eno-gastronomic assets. This rather conventional image is geographically concentrated on the neighborhoods perceived as tourist neighborhoods.

This analysis provides a critical reflection of the actual strategy of destination management organizations and the storytelling they transmit. The findings can help to orientate their future actions and provide a method of analysis that can be repeated for other destinations.

This paper sheds new light on the use of urban landscapes in nonstatic images both as a narrative subject and as a tangible tourist space in promotional discourse.