  This paper revisits the notion of a spanning hypertree of a hypermap
introduced by one of its authors and shows that it allows to shed new light on
a very diverse set of recent results. The tour of a map along one of its
spanning trees used by Bernardi may be generalized to hypermaps and we show
that it is equivalent to a dual tour described by Cori and Mach\`\i. We give a
bijection between the spanning hypertrees of the reciprocal of the plane graph
with $2$ vertices and $n$ parallel edges and the meanders of order $n$ and a
bijection of the same kind between semimeanders of order $n$ and spanning
hypertrees of the reciprocal of a plane graph with a single vertex and $n/2$
nested edges. We introduce hyperdeletions and hypercontractions in a hypermap
which allow to count the spanning hypertrees of a hypermap recursively, and
create a link with the computation of the Tutte polynomial of a graph. Having a
particular interest in hypermaps which are reciprocals of maps, we generalize
the reduction map introduced by Franz and Earnshaw to enumerate meanders to a
reduction map that allows the enumeration of the spanning hypertrees of such
hypermaps.
