Estudo das transformações socioespaciais de lugares turísticos da Costa dos Corais, Alagoas, e da Costa Brava, Catalunha

Abstract

This text examines the process by which town and villages with economies based on agrarian or fishing practices have transformed into destinations for tourism and real estate development. Coastal places that are removed from cosmopolitan sociocultural modes and practices, and that have heretofore been geographically isolated and suffered few modifications, have become targets for growing tourist and real estate phenomena. The study investigates two parallel cases of this aforementioned phenomenon: first, the village of El Port de la Selva, on the northern coast of Catalonia, in Spain; and second, the case of villages in the municipalities of Porto de Pedras and São Miguel dos Milagres, on the northern coast of Alagoas state, in Brazil. Historically, these places have been loci of primarily subsistence-based fishing and agricultural practices. In the present day, they have become locations for tourism, in addition to offering opportunities for expanding real estate markets. As such, the study aims to investigate socio-spatial transformations that occur as a result of the insertion of the tourist-real estate phenomenon in the villages examined in these two case studies. The research adopts a historical-ethnographic methodology based on direct observation; open and closed interviews with actors who live and pass through these locations; and a bibliography focused on the places under observation. The research notes that socio-economic practices linked to tourism and real estate activity create income and employment opportunities, but that these opportunities do not contemplate the entire populations of the places studied. The tourist-real estate context has also attracted small- and medium-scale investors, raising the cost of land and impeding the access of lower-income populations to housing, whether as owners or tenants. This situation has undermined factors that are essential to social cohesion by separating people from their former spaces of sociability, their traditional ways of life, and their means of subsistence, in addition to contributing to a relative loss of a sense of neighbourliness. Thus, the research has identified signs that the unequal distribution of land ownership and means of production on a local level has contributed to the existence of an unequal distribution of wealth in regards to the tourist-real estate phenomenon. Yet the insertion of new actors and new forms of capital, as well as the adoption of local mechanisms of inhibition or resistance, have served to counterbalance older relations of prestige and power while guaranteeing space for local practices. It is worth noting, however, that this counterbalance derives from connections between environmental interests and – contradictorily – capital itself, which is not always local. Finally, the research considers the interwoven nature of tourist activities and real estate in the case studies to be both cause and effect of the phenomenon of touristic gentrification. The study contributes to a better understanding of relationships between tourism and real estate activities in places far removed from major urban centres, with an emphasis on their economic, sociocultural, and environmental consequences.