The adviser for Culture, Tourism and Sports, José Alberto Díaz Pico, has linked this Tuesday the decline in tourism in the Autonomous Community to the "fear of the train", the cut in the supply of air connections, and the absence of new General State Budgets (PGE). Faced with this view, the representative of the Socialist Parliamentary Group, Sergio Iglesias, has blamed this drop on Vox's "attitude" and its "indoctrination against tourism".
During the defense of a parliamentary interpellation in the Plenary Session of the Cortes of Castilla y León, Sergio Iglesias emphasized that "the average spending per person in Castilla y León during the year 2025 was 208 euros, compared with 363 for the national average" and that overnight stays in rural accommodations "fell by nearly 6 percent".
The Socialist representative also criticized the distribution of the Department's resources and the recent controversies surrounding cultural policy: "I have talked about tourism and I have talked about how its attitude, its way of being, and its indoctrination against tourism harm it".
In response, the adviser for Culture, Tourism and Sports rejected that the Junta is responsible for the deterioration of the figures and insisted that the central Government "is the worst enemy" of the tourism sector in the Autonomous Community.
Díaz Pico argued that "part of the travelers has stopped trusting the train" after the latest railway incidents and attributed the reduction in flights to decisions about Aena fees. In addition, he contrasted the stability of the regional accounts with the lack of new state accounts, noting that "the State has been without new budgets since 2023" and that in the last allocation from the Ministry of Culture for the Community "almost six out of every ten euros stayed in Madrid".
With regard to tourism promotion, the adviser announced the preparation of the Strategic Tourism Plan for Castilla y León 2027-2030, with the goal of increasing the average length of stay in hotels to more than two days and raising the average spending of visitors.
Likewise, he defended the decision to replace the items coming from the European sustainability funds with the Junta's own financing in order to achieve "more freedom of action and less dependence on ideological constraints".
In light of this, Sergio Iglesias has reproached the regional Government that the General Directorate of Tourism has “barely 10.62 million euros in real investments” for the next financial year, and he has compared this figure with that of single-province communities such as Asturias.
In addition, the Socialist representative has denounced the administrative difficulties faced by museum professionals and the conflicts with events and cultural institutions such as the Hay Festival, the Seminci, and the sphere of theatrical creation. Along these lines, he concluded that “what you really fear is that people can think, that people can inform themselves, that people can express themselves, and that people can freely listen and learn”.