Tourism in the Amanã sustainable development reserve from the perspective of local communities

Abstract

Community-based tourism presents itself as an activity that prioritizes the encounter and the respect between hosts and guests, seeking local empowerment to achieve self-management and social emancipation. This form of tourism has been growing in rural areas of preserved nature where traditional populations live, standing out as a trend in environments such as the Amazon. The Amanã Sustainable Development Reserve, in the state of Amazonas, houses communities that seek to develop their own forms of tourism, associated to the conservation and the valorization of culture. The objective of this work is to present some opinions of residents of Amanã Reserve about tourism collected with interviews in meetings or during ethnographic research over more than a decade of investigations in the region. The diversity of positions and expectations reveal the different perspectives and the continuous nature of the construction process of tourist planning, which carries with it the residents’ hope in achieving improvements in their lives. Structural deficiencies and governmental helplessness appear as limitations to local progress, which can either be an obstacle for tourism or be partially met by the development of the activity.