Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the contribution of small initiatives of community-based tourism in Galicia to the socio-ecological resilience of threatened socio-ecosystems

Paper long abstract:

The development of community-based tourism in Galicia has been slow and not well organised. The small initiatives that have appeared in the last two decades have failed to constitute a strong alternative for a more environmentally friendly way of managing natural resources at regional or municipal level. This is particularly worrying as many Galician socio-ecosystems are rapidly changing following the abandonment of small-scale farming and the expansion of eucalyptus plantations. However, those few CBT initiatives that have actually succeeded contribute to the socio-ecological resilience of the most intimate kind of socio-ecosystems: those at the domestic space. Gardens, fields, houses and orchards have been produced and reproduced through new practices as households abandon the primary and secondary economic sectors of production and move into initiatives of CBT. In fact, it is unclear whether the preservation of these domestic spaces is a strategy to develop the CBT initiative; or the CBT initiative is an instrument for the preservation of these natures. In any case, what seems clear is that these new practices generate a mosaic of resilient socio-ecosystems which aggregated might have notorious socio-ecological importance. In this paper, I will describe the kind of practices and domestic natures that CBT produces and preserves.