When thinking of tourism in Peru, one’s mind quickly turns to Lima and Machu Picchu, which are areas that tourists often visit due to their immense popularity. However, just miles away, local communities, such as Luquina Chico and the Cordillera Blanca mountain region, provide the same otherworldly experience, including magnificent sights, sounds, eats and more. With new varieties of tourism, including experiential and volunteer tourism in Peru, tourists can immerse themselves in the Peruvian culture outside of the immensely populated and toured areas while also providing economic benefit to the people.

Experiential Tourism with Homestays

About 80 percent of tourism in Peru consists of Turismo financial or experiential tourism. In this homestay option, families provide their homes to tourists to teach them about Peruvian culture by fully immersing them in it.

The community council facilitates all homestays in order to provide fair opportunities for economic benefit to all families. An area with homestays is Luquina Chico, a quaint community an hour and a half plane ride away from the regular tourist go-to, Lima, which resides on the edge of Lake Titicaca. To tourists, an experience in a Luquina homestay feels like full cultural immersion. To the communities and Peruvian families offering homestays, it feels like economic assistance and an entrance into Peru’s thriving tourism sector, symbolizing a well-developed system of exchange. For instance, while staying at a homestay, LA Times writer Thomas Curwen experienced the tranquility of the Luquina environment, as well as the Peruvian culture and food the Gutierrez family offered.

Host families benefit from receiving fantastic interactions with foreigners as well as monetary benefits when tourists pay for meals and nightly lodging. Such earned income provides a sustainable tourist economy for hosts, and also allows Luquina residents to work from home rather than having to migrate outwards to bring income in. It also provides the ability for Peruvian host families to undertake structural repairs to homes or new construction to build paths.

Volunteer Tourism

Volunteer tourism in Peru offers another immersive experience to tourists while also directly assisting individuals and communities with volunteer time, skills and energy. In this exchange, tourists experience Peru through skills exchange, which directly makes valuable contributions to communities in need. There is usually a contradicting image of tourists in poverty-stricken areas often overlooked in the face of vacation. Inspired by this, the owner of WWTrek, Dean Cardinale, found a sustainable way to give back. The organization does so by hosting treks across mountainous areas to provide community assistance for at least one day on the trip.

For 2020, treks include Peru’s Cordillera Blanca mountain range in Huaraz, with a stop in the village of Pashpa, for tourists to complete a computer community center. Such a project at completion will provide Internet access to 400 residents with 10 laptops and digital cameras and 500gb of new educational content, thus providing a significant impact to an otherwise remote area.

It is imperative for one to note that approximately 6.9 Peruvian individuals live in poverty, living on less than $105 U.S. a month. At the same time, Peru’s tourism industry contributes $19.6 million to the economy while providing 1.2 million residents with jobs. With such a huge impact, responsible tourism could positively impact the alleviation of poverty when considering the potential amount of people that could vacation responsibly. People often think of a vacation as a treat to themselves, however, homestays or volunteer experiences show that one’s presence in another country could be a treat to locals as well.

– Elizabeth Yusuff
Photo: Flickr