We live in a time when classic tourist trips are a thing of the past. Due to the COVID 19 pandemic, all types of rural tourism, especially rural tourism, are finally becoming more and more interesting for tourists, even in Croatia. Continental counties record growth in tourist traffic, including Karlovac County. One of the most important and most frequently mentioned trends due to the COVID 19 pandemic is turning to the local. Namely, cancellations of international flights and difficulties with border crossings turned us to discover our own country. The trend was also contributed to by the campaigns carried out by numerous European countries in order to motivate their residents to vacation in their homeland, including the Republic of Croatia. Rural areas around the world face increasingly complex land use and development problems. Today, rural areas are most often characterized by a small number of mostly elderly people, small agricultural family farms and underdeveloped infrastructure. The above points to the need to establish such an economic orientation that will result in the revitalization of rural areas, but also the retention of the local population in rural areas. Rural tourism is defined as a part of the overall tourist offer in which the village is the main attractive attribute, which is visited by the urban population for outdoor recreation and enjoyment of leisure and peace. It includes tourism valorization of agricultural areas, natural resources, cultural heritage, rural settlements, local traditional customs and products through specially designed tourist products that mark the identity of the area and meet the needs of guests in the area of accommodation, food and beverage services, recreation and activities, animation and other services with the aim of sustainable local development. The aim of the paper is to provide an insight into the main theoretical determinants of the rural area and rural tourism and its role in rural development, and to analyze the subject of the research on the example of the Municipality of Žakanje in Karlovac County. In this paper, it is primarily about sustainable tourism, i.e. the development of tourism in the already mentioned rural areas. Karlovac County is located in central Croatia, the area of which is 3,626 km², where 112,596 inhabitants live, the population density is 31.09 inhabitants/km2. The county has an important transport and geostrategic position. It is an intersection and hub of important national and European roads, it is in the immediate vicinity of urban centers such as Zagreb, Rijeka, Pula and Zadar, Ljubljana. When talking about the development of rural tourism in the area of the Municipality of Žakanje, all previous4 research indicates that it is an area of exceptional natural and social potential, but insufficiently valorized in tourism. In the area of the Municipality of Žakanje, four key elements on which rural tourism develops and rests are extremely well represented. These are natural rural resources (rivers, lakes, mountains, forests and pastures), the rural way of life that still exists in the rural areas of Karlovac County (crafts, local events, enogastronomy, traditional music, etc.), rural heritage (traditional architecture, history, castles, churches, villages, etc.) and therefore space for rural activities such as horse riding, hunting, fishing, hiking, cycling, water sports and a whole range of outdoor activities.