Tourism in Playas de Cuyabeno was barely a presence before 1991, when a cruise ship — the Flotel, run by the tour operator Transturi — began sailing the river. Since then, many members of the community have found steady work aboard it, as boatswains or crew. Transturi, for its part, has covered the cost of local education and offers free first aid to the community.
Working alongside tourists has sharpened an awareness of the environment's value that wasn't always explicit before — and it pays, which helps. Logging has dropped off considerably as tourism income has risen to take its place.
A few years ago, the community sat down together to ask whether they could do more with tourism on their own terms. The answer was to build huts for visitors — and building them meant reviving mingas, the old system of obligatory shared labour that had been fading out of use. Families now take turns maintaining the huts, which means the income from them is shared close to equally across the community rather than concentrated in a few hands.
This made the community unanimous again, and brought back an almost lost habit.
Language has been the harder trade-off. Years of working mainly in Spanish with tourists and tour operators has eroded fluency in Quichua — he admits he spoke almost only Spanish, even at home. That's started to shift back, though: schools now give more attention to Quichua, and it's being spoken more again. Keeping that identity intact, he says, matters for tourism too, not just for its own sake.
What tourism has bought the community, above all, is options. Rising incomes mean children can be sent to school further afield — an education he sees as essential for the next generation to hold their own against outside pressures steadily closing in: oil companies, colonists, the wider world in general.
His advice to visitors is short and specific: don't smoke in the rainforest, don't make excessive noise, drink modestly, and never photograph an Indigenous person without asking first.