Focusing on the long-nineteenth century Pyrenean tourism case, this article aims to investigate the tourist planning logics that determined the commodification of the desire for natural environments. Our goal is to imbed in economic history the part of imaginary that motivates, makes sense, challenges and reproduces relationships with nature. Indeed, tourism is an example of an imaginary positioning towards nature that produces concrete social and natural relationships and spaces. This set of practices is based on an ideal change in the eighteenth century which transformed certain elements (thermal waters, landscapes, climate, mores, etc.) into emotional and sanitary resources. This change was appropriated by local and regional, as well as public and private actors who undertook the planning of their environment in order to merchandise it. Controversies emerged, testifying to positions of power and different ways of seeing the future and the commodification of desires of nature. Furthermore, the tourist imaginary renewed the mountains’ territoriality and ecosystem which transitioned from being an agro-pastoral and local common space to that of a more global heritage. Finally, planning aimed to structure the touristic areas to make them correspond to desires of heterotopia, eliminating the part of nature and social relations that were deemed undesirable.