The Jinlin watery area of Deqing County, a mountainous rural tourism destination, was selected as an example. Using participatory observation and spatial statistics, the paper analyzed the influence of tourism development on the "Production-Living-Ecology" space of Jinlin watery area in 2000, 2008 and 2018. We also discussed the bottleneck and optimization path of the "Production-Living-Ecology" space of Jinlin watery area. We found that (1) before the tourism development, the land structure of Jinlin watery area was single, with single land function and patchy distribution. The style of village was traditional and its infrastructure was imperfect. The spatial morphology changed steadily and expanded slowly. (2) After tourism development, land use types were diversified and new composite land appeared. The function of land use was complicated, mainly serving tourism. The landscape of the village was modernized and the living space became more comfortable. (3) Through comparing the development of before and after tourism, it showed that the land use became large-scale, and the space utilization took residential areas as the core and expanded to the periphery in the form of a circle. The "Production-Living-Ecology" space transformed into each other, and the reconstruction of rural settlements was relatively significant. The village landscape changed greatly, presenting a new urbanization trend. (4) The problems existing in the spatial evolution and tourism development of Jinlin watery area included low efficiency of production land, low quality of living land, shrinking ecological space, single tourism products, lack of innovation, and imperfect tourism service functions. For these reasons, the paper put forward optimization suggestions from five aspects: improving the quality of living space, increasing the efficiency of production space, protecting ecological space, innovating tourism industry, and land use.