Rural elected officials are becoming increasingly involved in public landscape policies, to such an extent that very often they are the initiators of local landscape interventions. Several studies have shown that they see tourism and the arrival of holiday home owners as factors in local development, a substitute for stagnant or declining agricultural activity (Bages, 1998; Robert, 2001). The conjunction of these two phenomena is frequently interpreted from an economic perspective, according to which the rural landscape is a local resource whose improvement may bring advantages and enhance the appeal of the area for both tourists and residents. This connection between awareness of the landscape and development does not account for all the reasons that prompt local elected representatives to become involved in landscape initiatives (Michelin, 2000). Here it is a matter of a broader examination of how these protagonists appropriate the notion of landscape from a public intervention point of view, although the projects are organized in partnership with other institutional stakeholders. Our hypothesis is that the mayors' scope in the exercise of their function gives them a special role in the implementation of public initiatives to improve the landscape.