Fonte: ROTUR. Revista de Ocio y Turismo; Vol. 16 No. 2 (2022): Tourism, pilgrimage and local population; 1-15
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Resumo: Rural community tourism emerged in the 1980s as a way of connecting rural populations in the countries of the Global South with the service economy. Rural community tourism destinations are located along larger tourist routes, with the result that visitors usually spendonly a few hours there. Even this, however, can have a significant impact on these locations. Despite extensive research in this area, there is still much debate about the effectiveness of rural community tourism as a strategy for rural development. Based on a case ethnographed over the course of three decades (Amantaní Island, Lake Titicaca), this article examines whether the reasons for this lack of consensus within the research is due more to the characteristics of the context than to the tourism model itself. The analysis reaches two conclusions: firstly, contextual factors that seem insignificant can play an important role in the effects of rural community tourism at a social, economic and even political level; and, secondly, tourist routes do not necessarily impact equally on each of the localities through which they pass. The research uses an ethnographic deductive-qualitative design, and is based on an ongoing long fieldwork which began in 1990.
