Rurrenabaque, from illegal wood to tourism

“Timbeeeeeeer!”, was once the most often heard cry in the Rurrenabaque zone, an Amazonian municipality located at the foothill of Bolivia’s Western Mountain Range. That was commonplace more than 10 years ago when the region exploited precious wood. Its history began to change with the creation of protected areas and the organized arrival of tourists. Today, Rurrenabaque is one of the most sought after destinations in the country.

Local public administration identified tourism as the municipality’s productive vocation. With help from local, national and international institutions, Rurre (as it is fondly referred to by locals) became an example in changing its economy, formerly traditional and ravaging into a new alternative which is sustainable and green. This was no easy task, since some time back, Rurrenabaque “lived off the exploitation of timber”, said Mayor Yerko Nuñez.

But, why the change?

“When the inhabitants of Rurre dedicated themselves to timber exploitation, the economy went well but was not sustainable”, says Municipal Tourism director, Leoncio Janko. “Besides, little by little, the forest that once gave us shelter and food was being destroyed”, he adds. The future wasn’t promising.

The portenhos (Rurrenabaque born) also awoke to the fact that tourists that passed through Rurre left behind sizeable sums of money and that they arrived in search of a living forest and not a dead one. From then onwards, the municipality decided to encourage tourism through planning performed with the participation of its inhabitants. According to Mayor Yerko, “Rurre chose tourism as a life-giving alternative”, which resulted in policies and agreements with national and departmental governments, foreign cooperation and tourism operators.

What helped in this process was the creation, in the 90ies, of two national protected areas within the municipality’s zone of influence: the Madidi National Park and Natural Area of Integrated Handling (PN-ANMI) and the Pilón Lajas Biosphere Reserve and Community Lands of Origin (RB-TCO). The goal was to protect the biodiversity which existed in both areas aside from “ensuring the permanence and survival of the communities of indigenous people that had always lived there”, explains the Tourism director.

Local tourism began to organize itself, to grow and improve. More and more tourists began to arrive. According to official information from the Ministry of Tourism, in 2008, Rurrenabaque received 51,886 visitors and generated 5 million dollars, a high figure for a small town of just 20 thousand inhabitants.

A study from the Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Conservation International and the Netherlands Embassy, shows that Rurrenabaque has 32 hotels, 25 travel agencies and 16 gastronomic centers, aside from hundreds of operators prepared to offer quality services. 90% of its population is connected in some way to a tourism activity.

CIn the words of Mayor Yerko, “the best way to offer tourism is by caring for nature and using its flora and fauna in a sustainable manner”. He points out the importance of new investments that can result in better quality of life for the population. “Today we are the country’s third most important destination”, says he. He recognizes that this is the result of a long term work which was carried out with much effort by many people. “Rurrenabaque is a model of growth and development that must be followed by the rest of the country, the result of an agreement between its people, authorities, private and public organizations as well as others”, completes Alcides Santalla, owner of the Bala Tours travel agency.

The region’s riches

Rurrenabaque is a blessed place with an exuberant nature, rich in biodiversity, culture and landscapes. For this reason, every year sees more tourists who wish to penetrate the Bolivian Amazon, meet and share with the culture of indigenous people (there are four ethnical groups in the region: the Tsimanes, Mosetenes, Tacanas and the Esse-Ejja) and see animals first-hand, in their natural habitats.

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Rurre has indeed much to offer to those who arrive there, from visiting the Amazonian Rainforest, notorious from being a humid woodland with a varied and dense vegetation of centenary trees, vines, ferns and palm trees, the perfect sanctuary for a large variety of insects, birds and mammals, up to the pampas, scarce grassy plains followed by rivers, lakes and swamps where one can see the boto, the freshwater dolphin, crocodiles, the jabiru, storks and, with some luck, the sucuri, or Amazonian anaconda

In Rurre we can also meet, for example, Mr. Eusebio Porco, a quechua native who arrived from the far distant and cold Potosí to settle in the warm and humid forest to “survive at any cost and plant what I could eat and sell”, he says. This was how he began to introduce agro-forest systems on his land, alternating the production of citric fruit, cocoa and heart-of-palm to soon work with swine, cows, bees and fish, “respecting Pachamama (Mother Earth), as my quechua culture had taught me to do”, he explains. Today, he is part of the Social Ecological Tourism (TES) project, a tourism program that enables a close encounter with the daily lives of communities of indigenous people and settlers who work in a sustainable manner with the region’s natural resources such as palm leaves to manufacture handicraft, Amazonian fruits to produce liqueurs and sweets as well as wood to manufacture furniture.

For the communities of indigenous people

The communities of indigenous people that live within the National Park and Natural Area for Integrated Handling of Madidi and Pilón Lajas, also joined the tourism bandwagon. Only in Madidi and its 1,880,996 hectares of land, there are more than 1,875 species of vascular plants, 1,370 of vertebrates, 220 of mammals and 917 species of birds on record to date. And, in the midst of this vast biodiversity, is where the Chalalán Eco Lodge is located, a community initiative supported by Conservation International (CI) and by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), more precisely in the quechua tacana community of São José de Uchupiamonas. In Chalalán, beside the lake with the same name, guided tours are offered by natives through themed treks, offering tips on jungle lore, aside from birdwatching and animal observation. Another enterprise undertaken by natives in Madidi is São Miguel del Bala, a community of tacana origins that offers its visitors the opportunity to experience the community close-up and experience its culture surrounded by nature.

In turn, the RB-TCO Pilón Lajas covers 400 thousand hectares and its biodiversity contains 73 species of mammals, 485 of birds, 103 of fish, 58 of reptiles, 36 of amphibians, aside from almost 162 of trees. This is also where community native tourism flourishes, at the tacana community of Asunción del Quiquibey, with its Mapajo project where it is possible to conduct visits to the regions of the greatest cultural and biological diversity in the protected area, observe birds and mammals and come closer to the community’s millennia old traditions.