Natural attractions and popular culture boost community tourism in Salitre (BA)

Vale do Salitre is located in the rural area of ​​Juazeiro, in the hinterland of Bahia. It’s a special place, with a waterfall, a cave, lots of samba, bumba-meu-boi (a traditional type of dance) and fertile land where hospitable residents open their homes to welcome visitors and exchange experiences. This is how community tourism is carried out with its natural attractions and popular culture.

It was through a popular education and communication project that the idea of ​​community tourism took shape. Journalist and historian Érica Daiane Costa proposed the project while she was still attending university, in 2010: “For my course completion work, I built, along with the community, a small printed newspaper called Carrapicho, which was very well accepted, so we continued it.”

The second edition of the Carrapicho newspaper was printed in 2015 and released online in 2016. The internet had just become popular in the community through mobile telephony and Érica, along with another journalist, Gisele Ramos, wrote a communication project for a notice from the NGO Brazil Foundation.

“This time we did a project without an academic profile but with a more activist perspective, working with young people in the community”, recalls Érica.

Education and communication

The communication and youth project was approved by the Brazil Foundation and, with the award received, the journalists carried out content production workshops. “We brought together young people from some communities in Salitre to participate in the workshops and, when we ended the project, this group wanted to continue providing popular communication, forming the Carrapicho Virtual collective”, recalls Érica.

At the same time, the journalists also created the Chocalho communication agency and, in partnership with the Carrapicho Virtual collective, began to develop a new project, this time, focused on education and ecotourism. The objective was to strengthen the region’s potential through natural attractions and popular culture, including youth as protagonists of this process.

This is where the idea of ​​community tourism came from. “We arrived at the Chocalho agency with experience in project development and coordination and put the youth of Carrapicho to play a leading role. The concern was to promote their income generation, based on local potential. Community tourism emerged as this possibility”, he explains.

Community tourism

Salitre’s community tourism project was inspired by the experience of Nova Olinda, a small town in the Cariri region, Ceará. “There is the Casa Grande Foundation, which has been working on communication with young people and community tourism for decades. I had the opportunity to learn about that experience when I was in college and I was enchanted, it inspired me to create Carrapicho”, says Érica.

Years later, through a partnership with the government of Bahia, Érica returned to Nova Olinda, this time accompanied by young people from Carrapicho. “We saw in practice that it was viable to promote community tourism in Salitre”. Thus, at the beginning of 2020, they carried out the first experiment, receiving a group of 28 young people from Piauí.

The government of Piauí sent the young people through a state project, financing their entire stay for three days, from Friday to Sunday. The group stayed in different houses of local families, where there was also food. “It was a pilot project to get a feel for the route, how people would be receptive, and everyone was super happy. We received a lot of compliments, the visitors created bonds, it went very well”, he recalls.

Natural attractions and popular culture

The tourist itinerary includes visits to Cachoeira do Salitre, Cerca de Pedra, Serra do Mulato, Samba de Véio, São Gonçalo and Bumba-meu-boi. “We do experiential tourism, something that is still alive”, says Érica. With the pandemic, however, tourist activities were suspended and only resumed recently, in September 2023.

Even so, community tourism managed to rescue the cultural, artistic and natural potential of the region. Érica was born in Vale do Salitre and says that the region was associated until a few years ago with a negative image, linked to water scarcity and the stigma of a backward place.

“The Salitre River used to flow into the Rio São Francisco, but at the end of the 1970s, with the arrival of electricity, agriculture intensified in the region and an intense dispute over water began, which continues to this day,” he explains.

Activism

The young Journalism student Roseane Pereira, aged 21, participated in the creation of the Carrapicho Virtual collective and says that the workshops that led to the creation of the collective, as well as her own experience with community tourism, made her “have a more critical outlook and more love for Salitre”.

“Érica and all the other supporters of the collective formed true activists, who are willing to fight for the causes of Salitre, including rural tourism, which was a very cool experience, both for the families who received the visitors, and for us young people, who we participated in the realization”, he points out.

Roseane, in addition to being a journalism student, is a cordelist and says that the collective changed her life: “I managed to begin studying  Journalism in 2021 and it was thanks to the experiences I had with Carrapicho”, she says.

Through the collective, she traveled to distant places for the first time. She went to  Nova Olinda, in Ceará, and then to Areia, in Paraíba, where she saw several initiatives “that could be implemented in Salitre and generate income not only for young people, but also for other people”.

The young people of Salitre

Salitre encompasses around 60 villages that are connected via dirt roads. It is a region with strong agricultural potential, where fruit production stands out, especially mangos, melons and grapes, as well as medium-sized animals, such as sheep and goats.

For Érica Daiane Costa, from the Chocalho agency, rural areas need to continue producing food. “If the countryside doesn’t plant seeds, the city doesn’t have dinner, so we need young farmers and animal breeders, but we also need to find other possibilities”, she argues.

She says that many young people of her generation migrated to the outskirts of the city to work in commerce “because not everyone wanted to pick up the slack”. The communication workshops for youth were designed precisely to show that the media could be used to promote the culture and landscapes of Salitre. A way to encourage young people to demand public policies for their stay in the countryside.

“Today our youth is taking Enem (Brazil’s national high school exam), entrance exams, seeking technical courses, becoming professionals… And this comes from this activism, when they begin to realize that they are also subjects of our reality, that they can show what is good about us, and that what is not good can be improved”, says Érica proudly.

Want to support this cause?

Follow Chocalho agency’s social media channels on Instagram, Facebook or get in touch by email: agenciachocalho@gmail.com

Also follow Carrapicho Virtual collective’s networks on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.