Detour

Bringing Community Tourism to Life: How Planeterra And The DERTOUR Foundation Are Showing That Community Tourism Is Not Just For Niche Travellers

What happens when you move beyond creating individual community tourism experiences and start integrating them into the wider tourism system?

Since August 2025, Planeterra and the DERTOUR Foundation have been exploring this question in practice, working together to integrate community tourism enterprises across Greece, Spain, and Thailand into DERTOUR’s product offerings.

The partnership demonstrates that community tourism does not need to be limited to niche travellers or alternative tourism. When communities are supported and tourism companies are willing to adapt their approach, community tourism can become part of mainstream travel, including destinations traditionally associated with mass tourism.

The DERTOUR Foundation supported this work through funding, while also helping connect Planeterra with DERTOUR Group teams and Destination Management Companies (DMCs) to explore how community tourism experiences could be integrated into existing travel offerings.

The work has reinforced a key lesson: community tourism does not scale simply by creating more experiences. It grows when communities have the support, partnerships, business skills and access to tourism markets needed to participate meaningfully in travel over the long term.

Building community tourism is not just about developing a great experience. It requires aligning community priorities with tourism operations, strengthening business capacity, understanding market expectations, and creating the right conditions for sustainable growth.

Moving Community Tourism from Experiences to a Sustainable Tourism Model

For many community tourism enterprises, reaching travellers requires more than a compelling story or unique experience. Communities need access to the tools, training, operational knowledge, and market pathways that allow them to successfully engage with tourism.

Through this partnership, Planeterra and the DERTOUR Foundation worked together to create a structured approach that supports community tourism enterprises at different stages of readiness. This included:

Identifying and assessing potential community tourism enterprises
Supporting communities through training and capacity building
Strengthening experiences and operational systems
Aligning community tourism offerings with DERTOUR’s product development processes
Helping communities understand what is needed to work with tourism operators and welcome more travellers.

A key focus was ensuring community tourism was not treated as a separate alternative, but as a meaningful part of how travel is designed and delivered.

Bringing Community Tourism Experiences to Market Across Thailand, Greece, and Spain

The partnership supported five community tourism enterprises across three destinations. While each destination had different needs, the work revealed that market readiness is not a fixed point, it is a process.

In Thailand, the focus was on connecting existing Planeterra-supported community tourism enterprises with DERTOUR’s supply chain.

The two selected communities, Laem Sak Community Tourism in Krabi and Khao Thep Pitak Community Restaurant in Surat Thani, already had strong foundations. The work focused on aligning operational details, strengthening communication between stakeholders, and ensuring the experiences were ready for travellers.

Laem Sak Community Tourism (Krabi, Thailand)

Laem Sak demonstrates how tourism can support the celebration of local cultural and environmental action. The coastal community offers village walks, local food experiences, and upcycling activities that connect visitors with the stories, traditions, and sustainability initiatives of the community.

Khao Thep Pitak Community Restaurant (Surat Thani, Thailand)

Khao Thep Pitak shows how tourism can transform a missed opportunity into shared prosperity. Once a scenic stop where visitors rarely engaged with local residents, the community has developed an ecotourism model that includes homestays, local meals, guided activities, and a community fund that reinvests tourism income locally.

The key lesson from Thailand was that even established experiences require careful integration. Contracting, logistics, pricing, guide coordination, and storytelling all need to align before an experience can successfully enter a tourism supply chain.

In Greece, the focus was on supporting community tourism enterprises that required further development before market integration.

In Crete, Planeterra worked with the Women’s Cooperative of Kritsa and the Carob Mill Arts and Cultural Centre (Epimenides) to strengthen experiences, operational capacity, and readiness.

Khao Thep Pitak Community Restaurant (Meal Prep)

Women’s Cooperative of Kritsa (Crete, Greece)

The Women’s Cooperative of Kritsa, founded in 2009 and led by women, preserves Crete’s culinary traditions through cooking classes, tastings, and shared meals. By transforming traditional food knowledge into visitor experiences, the cooperative creates income opportunities while strengthening women’s leadership and protecting cultural heritage.

Epimenides Cultural Society of Panormo (Crete, Greece)

The Epimenides Cultural Society of Panormos has revitalized the historic Carob Mill as a cultural space while promoting the importance of the carob tree as both a heritage resource and a symbol of sustainability. Through collaboration with local producers and researchers, the organization is helping preserve traditional knowledge while supporting environmental resilience.

The experience in Greece highlighted that community tourism development must be flexible and responsive to local realities. Progress depends on coordination between communities, destination partners, sustainability teams, and tourism operators, and these relationships take time to build.

ASOQUEGRAN – La Jaira de Ana (Gran Canarias, Spain)

In Spain, the partnership supported ASOQUEGRAN – La Jaira de Ana, a family-run farm experience connected to a network of artisanal cheesemakers preserving traditional cheese production.

The experience invites travellers into local agricultural traditions through activities such as cheese-making, goat milking, and food tastings. Beyond the visitor experience, the initiative supports rural livelihoods, protects native breeds, and promotes sustainable food systems.

The project also demonstrated the importance of adaptability. Community tourism development does not always follow a straight path, and flexibility is essential when timelines, partnerships, or local conditions change.

Learn more about our work in Spain here

Building Community Tourism Requires More Than Individual Experiences

The first year of implementation highlighted that making tourism more responsible requires collaboration across the entire travel supply chain: communities, tourism operators, destination partners and organizations supporting local development. Here are several lessons that apply across destinations:

1.Market readiness must be built, not assumed

A community tourism experience becomes market-ready through a combination of strong community foundations, operational support, training, and market alignment. This requires:

Understanding local realities
Identifying development needs early
Building confidence and capacity
Creating realistic pathways into tourism systems

2.Long-term partnerships make transformation possible

Integrating community tourism into mainstream travel requires collaboration between organizations with different roles, timelines, and expertise.

The DERTOUR Foundation partnership created the space for this collaboration by bringing together community development expertise, tourism operations, destination knowledge, and access to the wider tourism market.

This kind of partnership is essential because sustainable integration cannot happen through short-term interventions alone. It requires time, ongoing alignment, trust-building, and shared commitment.

3.Community tourism grows through ecosystems, not individual projects

While five experiences are moving toward integration into DERTOUR’s offerings, the partnership is also strengthening the broader community tourism ecosystem.

An additional 11 Community Tourism Enterprises in Spain and Greece have been onboarded into the Planeterra Community Tourism Network, gaining access to:

Training and learning opportunities
Technical support and coaching
Peer exchange with global community tourism organizations
Future funding opportunities through the Global Community Tourism Fund

This approach recognizes that communities are at different stages of development. Some are ready to welcome travellers today, while others are building the skills, confidence and connections needed for the future.

Looking Ahead

The work with the DERTOUR Foundation demonstrates that community tourism integration is not simply about adding new experiences to itineraries. It is about changing how tourism connects with communities and ensuring that more of the benefits of travel reach local people.

When community development, product design, commercial alignment, and long-term support come together, tourism can become a stronger tool for local economic opportunity, cultural preservation, and environmental stewardship.

What started as a partnership to bring community tourism experiences to market is becoming an example of how mainstream tourism can evolve to create more meaningful benefits for communities.

From Cheese to Heritage: How Community Tourism Helps Keep Rural Life Alive In Gran Canaria

Written by Lizeth Riaño, Community Tourism Development Specialist for Europe at Planeterra

In the rural heart of Agüimes, on the volcanic island of Gran Canaria, everyday life follows a different rhythm. Land, animals, food and family memory are not separate worlds here; they shape one another, sustaining a way of living that is still very much alive.

At La Jaira de Ana, a family-run farm, visitors are invited into that world not as spectators, but as participants. They knead, learn, taste and experience firsthand one of the island’s most rooted traditions: artisanal goat cheese. This is a working farm, a family legacy and a space where rural community culture continues to evolve without losing its essence.

A Community Legacy Rooted In The Land

La Jaira de Ana began as an initiative in 2002 and took shape as a structured enterprise in 2018. Its purpose was clear from the start: to keep the primary sector visible and valued within Canarian culture, while creating a space for learning, connection and exchange.

As the family describes it, the farm is “a place of learning where children and adults can connect with nature, in an environment where animals live freely, happy and free from exploitation.”

The project is led by Anabel Calderín Castro, a social worker, farmer, educator and daughter of a shepherding family from Agüimes. Her work brings together two worlds: inherited rural knowledge and a professional background in social intervention and community empowerment.

Beyond managing the farm, Anabel has over a decade of experience working with women, families and vulnerable groups, including programs focused on recovery from gender-based violence in natural environments. She also leads initiatives that connect rural development, education and emotional wellbeing. This social and agricultural lens shapes everything that happens at La Jaira de Ana.

Cheese As Living Heritage

At the heart of the farm is cheese, not only as a product, but as a practice. La Jaira de Ana is part of ASOQUEGRAN, a non-profit association of 26 artisanal cheesemakers working to preserve traditional raw-milk cheese production across the island.

In Gran Canaria, cheese is not only food; it is memory. It carries the landscape, the climate and generations of knowledge. The native Canary Island goat, adapted over centuries to this volcanic terrain, is central to this ecosystem. Its milk is not just an ingredient, but a reflection of place, climate, and history.

Rural life is increasingly under pressure from urban expansion, economic instability, and cultural erosion. This network plays a vital role in keeping its knowledge alive.

The farm sits at the intersection of several urgent realities in rural Gran Canaria. Traditional farming knowledge risks disappearing if it is not actively transmitted. Small-scale farmers struggle to survive economically, local food systems are often replaced by imported industrial alternatives, and younger generations are increasingly disconnected from rural life.

This also matters on an island transformed over the past decades by mass tourism, where rural territories, local food systems and everyday cultural practices can easily be pushed to the margins. Against that backdrop, experiences like this offer a different kind of tourism: slower, more grounded and rooted in reciprocal learning.

The relevance of this approach has become increasingly visible in recent years, as public debate around the impacts of tourism has intensified across the Canary Islands. Questions about how tourism can generate greater benefits for local communities while reducing pressure on housing, natural resources and everyday life have become increasingly important. Community tourism initiatives such as La Jaira de Ana offer a practical example of how tourism can contribute directly to local livelihoods, cultural preservation and rural resilience, while creating more meaningful experiences for visitors.

What makes this tradition survive is not nostalgia, but work. As María del Carmen Pérez, community leader and director of ASOQUEGRAN, explains: “Tourism in experiences like this allows people to understand the full process: from milking to production to maturation. In the end, they discover the small story behind every piece of cheese they take home.”

Each cheese holds that story: the rhythm of milking, the transformation of milk, the patience of aging and the human decisions behind every step. There is no standardised flavour. Each artisan leaves a subtle signature shaped by experience, intuition and inherited knowledge.

Beyond preserving traditional cheesemaking, the project also demonstrates how community-based tourism can create tangible benefits for rural communities while keeping cultural heritage alive.

This combination of cultural preservation and community tourism is also what attracted the support of Planeterra and the DERTOUR Foundation. As Claire Ross, Sustainability Director at the DERTOUR Foundation, notes:

“At the DERTOUR Foundation, we’re proud to support initiatives like La Jaira de Ana that keep local traditions alive while creating real economic opportunities in rural communities. Together with Planeterra, we’ve worked to strengthen this experience so that it benefits the people who sustain it, while giving visitors a deeper, more authentic connection to the culture and landscape of Gran Canaria.”

A Hands-on Experience

The visit unfolds across different spaces of the farm, each revealing a layer of rural life. Guests are first welcomed outdoors and introduced to the story of the farm, the community and goat farming traditions in the region. From there, they move through the milking and production areas, observing how daily work is organized.

But the most important moment comes in the workshop. Visitors do not simply watch a demonstration; they become part of the process. Step by step, they curdle milk, cut curds, shape, press and form their own cheese. The experience is simple, tactile and unexpectedly intimate.

Food then becomes a continuation of the same story. After the workshop, guests gather around a tasting table with cheeses from La Jaira de Ana and other ASOQUEGRAN farms, alongside local wine and beer, gofio bread, jams, sea salt and products made by women’s cooperatives. Nothing is imported for display. Everything has a place, a producer and a purpose.

Anabel observes that the people who come to the farm are often “environmentally conscious, respectful of their surroundings and genuinely interested in learning about the culture and reality of the Canary Islands.” That attitude matters. It turns the tasting into more than a pleasant ending: it becomes a moment of exchange between visitors and the people who sustain the island’s food culture.

Each participant leaves with their own handmade cheese, but also with a clearer sense of where food comes from, how it is made and what it takes to keep local production alive in a globalized world.

A Sustainable Way Of Keeping Rural Life Alive

At La Jaira de Ana, sustainability is not treated as a label, but as a daily practice with environmental, social and economic dimensions. Environmentally, the farm keeps resource use intentional and low-impact: organic waste returns to animal feed or soil, materials are reused where possible, biodegradable cleaning products are prioritized and plastic is minimised.

Socially, the project protects living heritage by making rural knowledge visible, dignified and teachable. It also reflects Anabel’s professional commitment to education, emotional well-being, and community empowerment. The experience is designed so that visitors understand rural life through direct participation, while local producers, women-led initiatives and cheesemakers remain at the centre of the story.

Economically, the model creates value where it is most needed: in the hands of people building viable futures in rural areas. As Anabel explains, experiences like this “generate income for people who are genuinely building businesses in rural areas” and, for that reason, feel “much more authentic and meaningful.”

The collaboration with Planeterra and DERTOUR Foundation has helped strengthen this model. For Anabel, their support has been practical and strategic: we helped her adapt the experience to different types of visitors, improve sustainability choices and think more carefully about materials, preparation and the organisation of the team. One of the most important lessons, she says, has been consistency: being fully prepared before each visit so hosts and guests can enjoy the experience together.

La Jaira de Ana shows that rural life is not something to be observed from a distance. It can be entered, shared and understood through practice. In a world where rural communities are often overlooked, this farm offers another narrative: one of continuity, dignity and active relationship with the land. Not as a memory of the past, but as a living present.

Bringing Community Tourism to Life: How Planeterra And The DERTOUR Foundation Are Showing That Community Tourism Is Not Just For Niche Travellers

Moving Community Tourism from Experiences to a Sustainable Tourism Model

Bringing Community Tourism Experiences to Market Across Thailand, Greece, and Spain

Building Community Tourism Requires More Than Individual Experiences

Looking Ahead

From Cheese to Heritage: How Community Tourism Helps Keep Rural Life Alive In Gran Canaria

Written by Lizeth Riaño, Community Tourism Development Specialist for Europe at Planeterra

A Community Legacy Rooted In The Land

Cheese As Living Heritage

A Hands-on Experience

A Sustainable Way Of Keeping Rural Life Alive

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From Cheese to Heritage: How Community Tourism Helps Keep Rural Life Alive In Gran Canaria