In Latin America, community resilience has emphasized the solidarity capacities and strengths of indigenous communities to face and proactively overcome adversities derived from political and social violence. This is the case of Mapuche communities linked to community based tourism in pre-cordilleran areas of southern Chile. This article analyzes tourism experiences of these Mapuche communities, based on a qualitative exploratory and descriptive approach, in order to determine their relationship with community resilience processes. The conclusion is that community based tourism has contributed to absorbing external disturbances associated with the processes of territorial dispossession, colonization, and extractive and neoliberal policies that these communities face, resist, and overlap without losing their identity. This tourism also reinforces processes of cultural revitalization of communities, connected social capacities, and development of organizational strategies to achieve the collective desire for a favorable future associated with their life plans.

This research explores the representations of cultural heritage, tourism and sociocultural impacts in the pre-cordilleran areas of the Panguipulli Commune, Los Ríos Region, southern Chile. The perceptions of public administration agents and representatives of local Mapuche communities linked to these matters are here examined. A methodology with a qualitative approach and participatory techniques was applied, proceeding to a pertinent literature review coupled with an exploratory and descriptive empirical study based on the case study method. The data have been collected through interviews, at different levels, with intentional sampling, for subsequent content analysis. The results indicate that in the activation promoted by the State, the natural and cultural heritage is ranked at the discretion of the expert and valued as a tourist attraction for its profitability and the promotion of local development. Negative sociocultural impacts arise marginally. From the local Mapuche perspective, tourism is recognized as the generation of complementary income, but additionally there are processes that trigger the strengthening of their identity and a revaluation of their cultural assets.