“The entire landscape in Guanacaste is being transformed based on the needs of real estate development. It’s something that is visually very clear.” These words are from Catalan researcher and tourism critic Ernest Cañada.
He said that to The Voice one afternoon in August, during a break from the short course he came to teach at the Nicoya campus of the National University (UNA) to analyze new trends in world tourism and how they are also seen in Guanacaste.
Cañada has been investigating and analyzing the implications of tourism around the world for more than 15 years. He is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of the Balearic Islands and also coordinates Alba Sud, an investigative news outlet that offers a critical look at tourism.
During his visit to Costa Rica, he welcomed The Voice to talk about the tourism network in the province and what it is bringing to communities. To him, it’s clear that it’s an unsustainable model. This is the conversation, edited only for space and precision.
During this visit to Costa Rica and Guanacaste, how would you describe the type of tourism development in the country?
There is a first very evident contradiction and it is that Costa Rica projects an image of green tourism and when one arrives, one realizes the contradiction that exists with Guanacaste’s tourism real estate development, which is an enormous environmental and social problem.
The second has to do with this strong support for residential tourism that has enormous problems. The first is that it causes an enormous environmental impact, because the logic of residential tourism is different from that of hotels. The basis of the hotel industry is to fill rooms, so you don’t have to continuously build a building; you have to be filling it. The logic of residential tourism is speculation based on land and the sale of the house. Once you have finished selling the house, the operation ends there. You can have very small complementary activities, with very little added value and little capacity to generate employment. But for the economic cycle to continue, you have to continue building and speculating with land.
The third characteristic is the support for elitism, in other words, due to this idea that in the face of the problems generated by mass tourism, we work to have fewer tourists but with greater purchasing power. Supporting this causes a lot of inequality and a lot of exclusion.
On several occasions, you’ve mentioned that the type of tourism that countries like Costa Rica are supporting is “a suicide race.” Why?
Because there aren’t enough rich people for everyone. We’re making a bet with enormous uncertainty. After the [COVID-19] pandemic, the sector came out with a lot of pressure and it seems that we’re at a time when there are all kinds of tourism. But the uncertainties that we had before the pandemic are still present: climate crisis, energy crisis, global supply problems, geopolitical tensions… All of that is a cocktail that puts a lot of pressure on a sector that is recovering but is very sensitive to these situations because it can’t control those external markets that don’t provide for everyone. We’re going to have to compete a lot between cities and territories to keep that market. It will go well for some, but for many others, it won’t, and in the meantime, they’ll have supported and spent enormous amounts of resources on promotion, infrastructure, events.
So, is it “less suicidal” to support more local tourism?
While we have this tendency towards elitism, we have a lot of people who can’t do tourism and there are no public policies designed for the local population. In this context, we have two paths: either we bet on and compete for elitism, which is what large cities like Venice, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Malaga, Mallorca, and Guanacaste and Costa Rica are betting on, or we support a transformation of tourism, thinking of domestic markets at short distances, with an enormous effort also in terms of training, of professionalization, because the domestic market is much more demanding. You can’t tell the same thing to someone who lives in the place that you would tell anyone who comes.
In Guanacaste, the tourist poles coincide with being places with low human development, and in countries like Spain, that’s also how it is. Why does tourism in these places fail to strengthen the multidimensional well-being of the populations?
Because it doesn’t intend to. Tourism specialization is the fast track to sinking into poverty. The problem is that the tourism development model has been based on living off of natural resources, beaches, and the environment. In other words, the hotel capital and the tourism capital live off of something that isn’t theirs, which is the environment, and they use it to benefit themselves. It’s based on that and on a large amount of very cheap labor. This doesn’t mean that the managers are not paid well, but the bulk of the labor force is paid very little and is based on labor exploitation. The basis of the business is there and it has never intended to be anything else. We need public policies to position tourism as an element of development.
What we have is a bifurcation: people who move a lot and who spend more and more, and people who can’t move. The population in Latin America with the highest level of tourism participation is Argentina. Until very recently, only 48% of the population could do tourism. This means that 52% aren’t doing it. When you look at it country by country, not even half of the population can do tourism. Either we bet on strengthening a strategy of tourism elitism and abandon everyone else or we put tourism as a strategy that serves to satisfy the needs of the majority of the population. And we need to do it within the biophysical limits of the planet. In other words, we can’t continue promoting long-distance flights on a massive scale.
The policies and the Costa Rican State seem to be encouraging this model of tourism that you are critical of. Some national examples that come to my mind are the law of digital nomads, the permissive and/or outdated regulatory plans, the permission for any person to obtain land…
The question is, who is the tourism policy for? Is it for investors or is it for the local population? What efforts is the ICT (Costa Rican Tourism Institute) making or what is the Barcelona City Council doing so that its inhabitants, who are ultimately those who are paying taxes, are doing tourism? It’s a very clear support for international tourism and clearly not to benefit and satisfy the needs and rights of the majority of the population.
In the interview you did in El Salto, you commented: “Tourism enters a territory. It deteriorates it. It exploits it. And then it jumps to the next one.”
But this isn’t new. There’s always a sector of tourists who venture into territories that aren’t so touristy and are looking for originality. They arrive and through them, others start arriving until the destination becomes saturated and they look for other places. And this is part of Costa Rica’s history. Costa Rica is a product of the saturation of Cancun, Riviera Maya. Of the saturation of Punta Cana, Bávaro. But when Guanacaste begins to become saturated, they begin to go up, towards Nicaragua. And that is a very clear dynamic of people who are already fleeing from crowded places in Guanacaste, but the political problem in Nicaragua prevents it from becoming established.
Recently a migrant family that lives in Nosara told me that they wanted to sell their house and leave due to the district’s insecurity and pollution. That family, with great purchasing power, will possibly be able to migrate while others will not…
That family that decides to leave will be able to go somewhere else, but people from the convenience store, the migrant workers who tried to build here will have a much harder time and will have already put together a life in Nosara or I don’t know where. For example, in Punta Cana, in the Dominican Republic, after the pandemic, there has been enormous residential growth, without any planning, without services, without infrastructure. The problem of managing it will be much worse than that of managing Cancun, which was somehow thought out and planned. Of course, here in Guanacaste, we have a huge problem around water.
You reiterate that the State and the public sector receive a lot of pressure from this type of tourism model. How can we perceive that pressure?
These are all well-oiled mechanisms that the business sectors have with the different governments. It wasn’t in vain in the previous government administration that we had a minister here in Costa Rica dedicated to relations with the private sector and he was from here in Guanacaste. In other words, we’re talking about how to oil these relations and how the private business sector manages to position itself so they make the investments it needs in the field of promotion, of infrastructure, in the field of labor laws that facilitate certain working conditions, that is, in non-compliance with legislation; not providing the state with the capacity for surveillance and labor inspections that allow these workers here in Guanacaste to be under the conditions in which they are.
There’s a very forceful statement of yours: “We’re not living off of tourism; it’s tourism that is living in us.” How do you explain it?
We’re not living off of tourism; it’s thanks to us that tourism lives. How? Through miserable jobs, with workers who have to work their butts off. In addition, they’re also living off of our common resources, our spaces, our beaches, our popular festivals. Without wanting to or being paid, we’re working for the tourist, offering them settings that are attractive to them. [In Spain], we have popular festivals now in August. They’ve become a forum for dispute and tourist enticement. The hotel sector and Airbnb housing live off of us having these activities that are attractive, that we, the neighbors, organize ourselves to do, but that we can no longer enjoy.
And how does what you point out apply to residential tourism, which Guanacaste is betting on a lot?
They’re living off of those resources that people are prevented from getting. In Papagayo, you have the paradigmatic example. You’re living off of creating a luxurious environment with natural resources that are not accessible to the majority of the population and although it might not be so legally, in practical terms, people are prevented from being able to live their daily lives in those places where they used to go to swim or where they did activities in each place. The logic is the same, that is, the tourism industry lives fundamentally off of exploiting the resources that exist in that environment.
A few weeks ago, the richest family in Asia, Anant Ambani and his wife, arrived in Guanacaste. According to media reports, the price they paid per night was $50,000. What economic chain does this type of visit generate for the communities?
Who tells you that this money is staying in Costa Rica? Just because someone pays a lot doesn’t mean that it is redistributed better. First of all, salaries are not much better because someone spends more. In addition, we’re facing a sector with a much more serious environmental consumption in terms of atmospheric pollution with private jets, with the consumption of natural resources such as water. That is to say, we’re making a bet on a sector that actually spends a lot, yes, but it doesn’t mean that this money is redistributed well. Instead, we criminalize the “come huevos” (literally, egg eaters – people who come to the beach for the day in busloads and generally bring their own food) and people from the working-class sectors when we’re not creating infrastructure or conditions for them.
Tourism is the province’s main economic activity. What more sustainable alternative could Guanacaste aspire to? Is there any successful model?
I think the key is in economic diversification, in non-dependence. Stop believing in the neoliberal scheme that the market will provide and that you specialize in something and be very competitive in something, and return to schemes that allow us to diversify the economy much more and not be so vulnerable to risk scenarios.
Touristification has caused multiple demonstrations against these tourist models that you point out. In Costa Rica, there is now talk of gentrification and the issue is beginning to be mentioned in the Legislative Branch. In the face of movements critical of tourism, terms such as tourism-phobia arise. How can this term be understood within the resistance to touristification?
I think that tourism-phobia isn’t useful for understanding anything. It’s a term that has been in circulation since 2014, mainly in Barcelona, and it has spread from there. It emerged at a time when the first big cycle of protests against tourism began, which lasted between 2014 and 2017. As a result of this process of global touristification and the penetration of tourism in all areas, there is social protest and changes in the state of opinion. The opinion barometer that the Barcelona City Council makes every year asks “What are the main problems that the city has?” and tourism is quickly positioned among the first places. In other words, people identify that the problem is unemployment, insecurity, transportation and tourism.
If you say that something is phobic, it’s because it’s irrational. So what you’re trying to do is delegitimize the reasons that are showing up there. These days, it has reappeared, and with squirt guns, it has been reinforced even more. And one of the slogans of the protesters on July 6 in Barcelona was “it’s not tourism-phobia; it’s class struggle.”
We have to get away from these tricky terms that haven’t been constructed to explain, but rather have been constructed as a weapon against an adversary. And the business sector has used the term tourism-phobia to delegitimize social protest.
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