My cousin Hannah Wallace is a food and travel journalist and blogger. She had a really interesting article on food tourism in Slovenia in the NY Times recently:
Agricultural tourism is not new in Slovenia, which is about the size of New Jersey and just east of Italy and south of Austria. As early as the 19th century, residents of Trieste would spend summer weekends on farms in the Karst.
Farm holidays became popular again after World War II, said Renata Kosi, Slovenia’s advisor for development of rural tourism, and have recently taken off, with the number of kmetije doubling to more than 600 in the past decade , as farmers looked to supplement their incomes. The average Slovenian farm is six hectares, less than 15 acres, Ms. Kosi said, and without some extra source of funds, “you can’t survive if you only have six hectares.”
The tourist farms offer activities like horseback riding and swimming (the Skerlj farm has an inviting swimming pool and lets guests use its bicycles), and guests who are of a mind to sample the country life in earnest can sometimes pitch in baling hay or picking cherries.
Typical rooms recall those in a Swiss hut: spare but immaculate, with lots of unfinished wood. Prices are a fraction of those at a tourist hotel.
But the outstanding attraction is the food.
