Construction of ecological civilization is one way to realize "beautiful China". Tourism is closely related to it because of its green attribute. It is of great significance to demonstrate whether tourism development can promote the construction of ecological civilization and explore its spatial spillover characteristics. This paper built a theoretical framework of the impact of tourism development on urban ecological civilization construction and spatial spillover effects. The ecological civilization construction level (ECC) of 284 prefecture level and above cities in China from 2004 to 2019 was measured by entropy weight TOPSIS method; The spatial Doberman model is used to reveal the impact of tourism development on the construction of urban ecological civilization and spatial spillover effect. The results show that:(1) the ECC of each city has improved to varying degrees, the relatively high value areas were concentrated along the lower reaches of the Yangtze River and the Yellow River economic belt, and the low value areas were mostly distributed in the central and western regions; On the regional scale, ECC in each region has been in a decreasing pattern of east-middle-west for a long time, and there is an obviously spatial dislocation between the internal differences of regional ECC and the development level of ECC among various regions. (2)Tourism development can significantly promote the construction of ecological civilization in local and adjacent cities, which is embodied in the improvement of the level under the "three wheel drive", and its driving force on the urban economic system is significantly greater than that of the ecological and social system. (3) The impact of tourism development on urban ecological civilization construction and spatial spillover effect in the east, middle and west regions have been released. Under the spatial heterogeneity, the intensity of the two effects basically overlaps with the urban ECC. (4) In terms of policy development, In order to bring into play the industrial externalities of tourism for the construction of ecological civilization, local governments should actively promote the digitalization of tourism and the integration of tourism and cultural industries, based on the principle of "ecological priority" in the long term; on the other hand, Chinese Government need to strengthen the transfer of special funds for tourism and establish a mechanism to support tourism between the eastern and western cities in order to achieve the development of tourism in the western region.