El Turismo en el Espacio Andino: Colonialismo, Simulacro y Memoria.

Abstract

The Andean world is underexploited for tourism due to both the lack of infrastructure and the lack of its development as a product. Still, tourism exists and is, in some places, overwhelming. As such, it establishes itself in a double market game: 1) it offers hotel infrastructures and tours that are clearly a product for foreign tourists, and 2) it recreates a whole discourse on heritage. The Andean tourism market has three self-contained aspects, which address 1) the indigenous world, either the historical or the present, although without confusing them or making a connection between them, 2) the colonial world, and 3) a high quality natural environment. This work, based on a critical decolonial view and ethnography developed from field work, analyzes the game between discourse and social practice from the point of view of both visitors and locals, thereby recreating some of its paradoxes and contradictions. This analysis, obviously from a decolonial and political view, attempts to recover the epistemology of the south.