Cheap buses, fast Spanish, and ecotourism: Lessons from the Lakes District

I was finally on my own, traveling through the land of lagos y volcanes that Che experienced, after a conservation finance conference in nearby Valdivia. Chile is a wonderful place to visit, combining the beauty of South America with the charm of Europe. And it's cheap: a decent hostel bed is around $10, and a six-hour bus ride cost me $4. Photos from the adventure are here.

After a rest day in Puerto Varas and a climb of Volcan Osorno - a stunningly symmetrical cone overlooking a massive glaciated lake - I headed to the tourist center of the Lakes District: the town of Pucon.


I went there to visit El Cani, a forest reserve that's home to the endangered araucaria tree, which has a limited range that is pushed to its limits by the expanding development frontier. El Cani was saved from land conversion by a local ecotourism proprietor. Revenues from a nearby ecoresort were used to finance the purchase of the reserve, which has since become a tourist destination in its own right. The araucarias are still safely perched on an isolated ridge within El Cani, this tree's last remaining outpost in the region.

Pucon is overrun by touristm, but don't blame the tourists. Countless recreational activities populate the region, including an active but accessible volcano that's practically inside the city limits.

From an environmental perspective, such masses of tourists may be cause for concern. And there are undoubtedly impacts on water quality in Lago Llanquihue (though fortunately the lake is huge), and certainly local pollution from the frequent traffic jams and innumerable autobuses ferrying tourists to their daily outdoor excursions.

But clustering of tourist activities is a good thing in many contexts. Even mega-destinations, like Cancun in Mexico, could be good for conservation: although they leave a staggering imprint on local ecosystems, they provide millions of tourists with the tropical vacation experiences they demand without disturbing large tracts of intact wilderness elsewhere in the tropics. Imagine how those landscapes would hold up if all those people chose more remote destinations located closer to important tropical ecosystems.

So there are trade-offs. We think part of the solution is to promote limited tourism development that provides economic development opportunities that encourage stewardship of critical habitat for biodiversity while avoiding the environmental costs of intensive development practices. The answers won't come easily, but we're working on ways to assess these alternatives, both at the project level and at a regional scale. We see great promise in some forms of "limited development" ecotourism, and we hope to identify and promote the most responsible forms of development.

As for fast Spanish: I have a long way to go on my Spanish skills, but every visitor to Chile agrees: Chileans talk really, really, ridiculously fast.