Strategies for territorial tourism planning in natural protected areas (NPAs): Alto Mayo Protected Forest (BPAM), Peru

The Alto Mayo Protected Forest (“Bosque de Protección Alto Mayo”, or BPAM for its Spanish acronym) is one of the largest natural protected areas (NPA) in Peru. The BPAM has several tourist attractions owing to its great biodiversity of ecosystems and species. However, the BPAM does not have an optimal offer of tourism services because of the lack of infrastructure articulated to the multiscalarity of its territory. The objective of this research is to propose integral strategies for permitted tourism uses of the BPAM, considering its plans and planning instruments oriented to the conservation of the ecosystem through sustainable projects. To diagnose the site and collect data, participatory workshops were held with local inhabitants and authorities involved in the administration of the BPAM. As a result, the BPAM was structured into five tourist zones to propose intervention strategies at three scales: territory, community, and architecture. At the territorial scale, a network of infrastructure and tourist circuits has been proposed. At the community scale, the suitability of each tourist zone was evaluated to propose activities classified as ecotourism, adventure, or rural. At the architectural scale, sustainable tourism equipment was configured through schematic strategies that considered the architectural object, connectors, and site. Finally, this study is synthesized as an example of an intervention instrument to promote sustainable tourism in NPAs with similar characteristics in the Peruvian Amazon.