Abstract: Under the background of rural revitalization, traditional villages have the ideal resources for tourism development due to their agglomeration of historical buildings and profound traditional culture. However, the tourism development of traditional villages in the underdeveloped areas is seriously hindered by their inadequate infrastructure construction, poor accessibility, and difficult development of non-agricultural industries, etc. In view of this, to study the tourism spatial structure in terms of the geographical location and traffic accessibility of traditional villages is of great significance, for it can provide theoretic support for accelerating the process of rural revitalization of the traditional villages. From the perspective of topological connection, this paper adopts the model of spatial syntax to comment on the spatial relationship of the traditional villages in Xiangxi Autonomous Prefecture. It also puts forward a tourism development spatial division strategy suitable for that area. The results show that: firstly, the overall distribution of traditional villages in Xiangxi is uneven, with three cluster areas of high density in the southwest, the middle and the northwest regions; secondly, the global accessibility and local accessibility of the traditional villages in Xiangxi are relatively poor, while the perceptive accessibility is relatively higher, and the accessibility of traditional villages are influenced by local terrain and topography, water system, and road network level.

Key words: traditional villages, accessibility, tourism spatial structure, Xiangxi Autonomous Prefecture