Da cana-de-açúcar ao turismo: Uma reconversão produtiva no processo de desenvolvimento do município de Areia-PB

Abstract

The municipality of Areia is historically recognized for the cultivation of sugarcane and other crops such as coffee, agave and sisal. Throughout the development of its productive processes, several factors were responsible for the promotion of economic crises that stimulated changes, among them the plagues, the excessive rainfall and the absence of railway infrastructure Even with the difficulties presented in moments of decadence, especially the cultivation of sugarcane was responsible for the construction of an architectural patrimony whose visiting and related activities to that have been used recently as an economic alternative to the crisis that occurred in the 1990s, caused specially by the bankruptcy of the Santa Maria Plant. The reappropriation of the architectural patrimony produced in the period of operation of the structures of the sugarcane mills points to a process of productive reconversion based on the proposal of reconfiguration of the use of space as a place of tourism and promotion of the Development of the municipality of Areia. The objective of this work is analyzing how this process worked out. To achieve this objective, we adopted the following procedures: (1) we carried out a historical-economic survey on the city of Areia; (2) we used secondary data and (3) we done semi-structured interviews with actors involved in the local productive reconfiguration, such as owners of mills, hotels and restaurants; Representative of SEBRAE; Public managers and members of local associations. This set of information allowed us to understand how tourism was conceived as a local development project, reacting to the economic fragility experienced by the municipality by combining the interest of sugar cane mills’ owners in converting their capital and the performance of public institutions responsible for promoting tourism.