Cocoa, conservation and tourism: Grande Riviere, Trinidad

This chapter focuses on the village of Grande Riviere, in north-east Trinidad. After a brief summary of its history, and its socio-economic characteristics in the early 1970s, the main focus is the village as it was three decades later, especially tourism and its impact on community life. The village had moved from a reliance on cocoa as the primary source of income to tourism. The village was attracting tourists, who came to experience the vast numbers of leatherback turtles which had begun to nest on the beach. Although tourism had barely been able to halt the decline of the village, villagers enthusiastically welcomed opportunities to gain income from tourism, they were more open to the world outside, they welcomed outsiders and embraced conservation of the turtle population (which had previously been primarily a source of food). In Grande Riviere, conservation and tourism combined to bring new opportunities to the village and to offer a tourist product that - albeit relatively small scale - was genuinely pro-poor.