Plants realize metabolic cycle through photosynthesis, which provides a good theoretical perspective for the evolution of tourism destinations. In this paper, the photosynthesis tourism destinations is put forward by analogy, so as to understand a path of co-evolution from single tourism destination to multiple rural tourism destinations based on routes cooperation. It presents the hypothesis and verifies it using a mixed study of the spatiotemporal evolution of tourism businesses and multi-subject interview data on the case of Route in Southern Anhui Province, China. The growth has gone through three stages of development, growth and maturity, and policy and capital are the most crucial factors for photosynthesis in tourism destinations. The photosynthesis in tourism destinations is a cooperative evolutionary thinking and ecological spatial planning strategy, and the tourism destination is in a constant metabolic cycle instead of weakening. In this paper, the metaphor of photosynthesis in tourism destinations is introduced as an analogy to describe a co-evolution model of rural tourism destinations. The study fills the research gap of the tourism area life cycle from the supply-side perspective of spatiotemporal changes in tourism businesses rather than the demand-side perspective of a diachronic number of arrivals and provides new ideas for the evolution of similar tourism destinations.