He wears several hats at once — hotel owner, tour operator, and head of a cooperative of eighteen hotel owners. Because tourism here is so seasonal, he also teaches English classes to keep an income flowing when the visitors thin out. It's not unusual, he says: everyone in Bahía working in tourism makes sure they have something else to fall back on. No one depends on it entirely.
On balance, he's glad tourism is here. It creates jobs, but just as importantly, it's brought a kind of cultural exchange that's made people more broad-minded. The town itself looks better for it — public green spaces are better kept, houses get painted, waste gets collected.
Bahía's setting does a lot of the work: mountains, rainforest, an unusual variety of birdlife, a sea with dolphins and whales passing through. Because that same nature is what draws tourists in the first place, he sees a direct incentive to protect it — sell the nature, and you'd better look after the thing you're selling, or the market disappears with it.
We sell the nature, and in return we need to protect it, otherwise we will ruin our own market.
The municipality has tried to build an environmental policy around that logic, though money has limited what's actually come of it. In 1999 the town declared itself an ‘ecotown’; what materialised was a privately run waste-collection and recycling service — useful, if modest against the ambition of the declaration.
He tries to walk his own talk. His hotel buys only biologically grown vegetables, sourced from his own farm; his waste gets sorted; his tour company, Dolphintours, uses only recycled paper. That same company also helps run a government-and-PMRC project pairing local fishermen with tourists on a small mangrove island in the Chone river delta — the fishermen handle the excursions, his company handles the marketing and some of the logistics.
“Think about who makes the profit when you buy food and drink,” he says. “A bottle of Coke barely puts money in local hands. A locally made fruit juice does.”