You are Mariela Palacios Mosquera, general manager of EcoTur del Pacífico, a nature-tourism operator on the northern coast of Chocó, Colombia. On Friday 6 March 2026 you sign the first of four quarterly decisions, and the board wants to know, before anything else, how many visitors a day you will receive.
The situation
EcoTur runs cabins, jungle trails and boat trips to watch humpback whales, fish with local fishermen and reach waterfalls. It works on the collective land of Afro-Colombian communities, under an agreement with the community council that is renewed every three years. Its owners are an impact-investment fund from Bogotá and three local families. Visitors arrive by light aircraft or after hours on a boat, and the high season, the whale season, runs from July to October.
The Ministry has just reported that international arrivals to the country grew 14%. Two lines below is the figure the board has asked you to explain: of every hundred pesos tourists spend, only three stay in local communities. EcoTur starts the year with COP 5,000 million in cash, no revenue yet and an inherited formula nobody defends: COP 200 million of investment and 15% of gross revenue for the communities. The dashboard agreed with the council shows a community index of 30 out of 100 and a sustainability score of 50 out of 100.
The board puts three capacity levels on the table: conservative, up to 50 visitors a day; moderate, between 50 and 150; and aggressive, more than 150. Andrés Mejía Lara, for the fund, wants more cabins, more boats and more people before the Coffee Region and Santander take the foreign tourist. Eufemia Valencia Hinestroza, the community council's legal representative, wants the money to stay in the territory and the forest not to fill up: “You count tourists. We count what is left when they go.” Your finance director, Hernán Asprilla Moreno, reminds you that every peso transferred comes out of the same revenue that pays for the operation.
There is one figure nobody has. The trails, the fresh water and the beaches can take only so many visitors, but nobody has measured how many.