Tourism, real estate development and depeasantisation in Latin America

Abstract

Residential tourism transforms societies and rural economies. Among other changes, it converts agrarian land into urbanized land, and brings new agents into the land market (real estate investors, clients acquiring second homes, etc.). These two factors imply an increase in land prices that often gives way to a crisis of traditional agrarian activities and stimulates the emigration of the local population. The present article examines how this process takes place. Is it simply a mechanism of supply and demand? Or are other economic and political factors at work? To understand this phenomenon, we analyze three South American cases, one in Brazil and two in Ecuador, in which residential tourism is in different stages of development.