Constructing globalized spaces of tourism and leisure: Political ecologies of the Salta Wine Route (NW-Argentina)

This study contributes to a growing body of literature examining tourism and amenity-led residential development in an emerging global countryside. It does so by analyzing the public-private efforts to nationally and globally position the Salta Wine Region as a premier tourism and leisure destination. A marketing effort highlighting the exceptional natural setting coupled with high-quality viticulture effectively seeks to reposition a peripheral Andean valley as 'the world's highest wine route'. Enabled by neoliberal policies, a variety of actors such as national and international wineries, real estate developers and hotel companies have produced new spaces for leisurely consumption. This paper analyzes the discursive and material restructuring of society-nature relations through a political ecology lens. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork it provides a grounded, micro-political account of the way in which distinct actors engage in and experience tourism and amenity-led development. Findings show that the current boom benefits the land-holding elite and new investors while escalating costs of living and unequal access to resources have deepened historically inherited socio-ecological inequalities. In contrast to findings from places in the Global North that have experienced a similar tourism and amenity boom, conflicts over landscape aesthetics and environmental protection are virtually absent in the study area. Socio-ecological conflicts concentrate on access to resources, affordable living, and livelihood improvement. Despite an increasing importance of tourism, amenity migration and related speculative investment in the Global South, studies have primarily focused on the Global North. Given the uneven geographies that such developments produce, augmenting the broader literature on tourism and amenity-led rural restructuring with a political ecology perspective comes at a timely moment.