Tourism industry in Spain accounts for more than 10% of both GDP and employment and produces an accordingly large amount of promotional texts, many of which have to be translated to the major European languages. Although translating into a non-m other tongue is strongly advised against, it seems to be a common practice in Spanish tourism industry. Therefore, inverse translation of texts belonging to tourism discourse genres is an important aspect in almost any translator training in Spain. Apart from being rather frequent in promotional texts, figurative language is generally challenging for translators and even more so for non-native speakers. The result are often literal or close translations which sound absolutely acceptable to the non-native translator, but awkward, flowery or, at best, amusing to the final audience. It would be helpful to be able to give translation students some general guidelines instead of explaining the unacceptability case by case. Most figurative language is based on metaphor. Since Lakoff and Johnson pointed out that metaphor is not only a linguistic means, but also a cognitive mechanism underlying a great deal of human conceptualization and abstraction processes, and therefore language itself, a lot of research has been conducted in this field. Cross-linguistic studies have found most of the researched conceptual metaphors and lots of their deriving linguistic expressions to coincide (Kövecses, 2010). Yet, experience tells us that there are differences in figurative expressions across languages and their appropriateness in a given context (see also Emsel & Endruschat, 2010). This paper aims to describe metaphors found in promotional texts in Spanish and German and look into the differences in kind and use. For this purpose two comparable corpora have been compiled from official German and Spanish tourism web sites. Metaphor identification was carried out following Steen’s (2007) procedures. References Emsel, M. & Endruschat, A. (eds.) (2010). Metáforas en la traducción – Metaphern in der Übersetzung. Munich: Martin Meidenbauer Verlagsbuchhandlung. Kövecses, Z. (2010). Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Steen, G.J. (2007). Finding Metaphor in Grammar and Usage. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.