📷 Visitor Experiences
Activities
Val Estrela Historic and Cultural Ecotourism Site
After about 20 kilometers through great landscapes, the trail arrives at Val Estrela—the port where one-third of the slaves arrived in Brazil. This is a site of profound historical and cultural significance, and Sinal do Vale has started executing a master plan to regenerate the rivers, the old church, and weighing station to create a historic and cultural ecotourism site. They're doing this work together with the local quilombola communities and fishermen who maintained this abandoned site over the past decades. These are communities with deep ancestral connections to this place, who have been stewarding it even as it was neglected by broader society. Sinal do Vale is determined to continue this work, recognizing that restoration must honor both the ecological and cultural heritage of this place.
Camino do Guaraú Eco-Tourism Trail
The 110-kilometer trail starts not by coincidence at Sinal do Vale. By curating this officially recognized Camino do Guaraú, Sinal do Vale galvanized entrepreneurs, activists, change makers, and farmers to join the regeneration movement. The trail reconnects the local community to its heritage, culture, and ecotourism potential. The trail continues through nine other segments in the beautiful mountain range of the Mata Atlântica. In each segment, Sinal do Vale has identified areas that need reforestation or conservation to create an agroecological belt to preserve and regenerate the biodiversity in the region. Not least among the species they're working to protect: the golden lion tamarin monkeys, an endangered species that depends on the health of this ecosystem. This work is about creating connected corridors of life, ensuring that the fragments of the Mata Atlântica can support the full diversity of life they once sustained.
Biocultural Hub
The site functions as a bioregional hub: a place where visitors, partners, and local actors meet, learn, and test ideas. It has developed into an internationally renowned UN Flagship Biohub—combining learning journeys, hospitality, and living prototypes of bioeconomic enterprise so regeneration is visible and repeatable, not only discussed. Two lines of work help keep the hub viable: Sinal do Vale’s own hospitality offer and the Madre Frutas social enterprise (below), which together connect revenue, training, and on-the-ground demonstration.
Nature Tours and Experiences
Public programmes lean on direct experience: guided day walks and night walks where moths, beetles, bats, and other nocturnal life appear; festival stalls introduce the association’s work in plain sight. Feeling attachment to local biodiversity, participants are more willing to volunteer labour for upkeep. Night tours underline that diversity runs on a 24-hour clock, not only daylight hours.
Traditional Horse Experiences
Horses are integrated as working partners: feeding, handling, light riding. The pitch is not stunt tourism but invitation into daily mountain life—pastoral rhythms and long cohabitation between people and livestock.
Guided Tours
Tours respond to a simple demand: visitors and locals want to know the story of the land. Guides frame history as orientation—where communities come from shapes where they can go. The format is participatory: guests walk with neighbours who move cattle on foot to high pasture, share meals such as balmoș on the slope, join mushroom forays, and help with hay in July or plum harvest in September—rhythms of work rather than packaged spectacle.
Huni Kuin Intercultural Exchange Hub
A planned hub would host respectful cultural tourism—lodging, guided visits, and teaching grounded in Huni Kuin cosmology and restoration work—so outsiders can witness progress, diversify income, and build accountable cross-cultural relationships.
New Revenue Development
Farmers now earn from work the landscape needs: restoring drystone walls (sometimes through local enterprises built around that craft), hosting visitors who want the story from the people who farm the land, and—in Wild Atlantic Nature—paid crews (for example) controlling invasive rhododendron several days a week. Payment is tied to ecosystem services, not only to commodity output—linking income to stewardship and creating rural jobs around that labour.
Regenerative Sanctuary
At the center of this project is a ceremonial dome built by the collective, where rituals, women's gatherings, intergenerational healing work, and arts-based events are held throughout the year. The space also hosts low-impact learning journeys and regenerative tourism, designed for deep listening, not consumption. Visitors engage through storytelling, ancestral practice, land-based work, and silence. Financial support is being sought to improve hosting infrastructure (kitchen, housing, water systems), offer stipends to local stewards and elders, and support regenerative programming that centers Muiska cosmology, ecological repair, and community resilience. The sanctuary serves as a living showcase for bioregional practices and a space for international learning exchanges. Visitors engage through storytelling, ancestral practice, land-based work, and silence, experiencing whispers of Mother Earth in this living temple of peace. As the grandmother Margarita—a revered elder of the World Council of Elders—used to say: "When the mind unites with the heart, everything is possible." This is Bosque Fractal's invitation: to unite mind and heart, to regenerate the land and the spirit, and to inspire Colombia and the world toward peace and ecological wholeness.
Ecotourism Development
Tourism is developed as a way to connect visitors to landscape regeneration and local culture—not as undifferentiated growth. Programs highlight stewardship, identity, and creative engagement with the Altiplano, so that travel reinforces the same regeneration story the alliance pursues in agriculture and nature.
Tourism Industry Transformation Initiative
Mallorca's economy is dominated by tourism, which comprises approximately 80% of economic activity. This creates a unique context for regeneration work—tourism is both part of the problem and a necessary intervention point. The alliance has started to work on crafting partnerships within the tourism industry in order to start catalyzing change. The work included producing documentary series highlighting regenerative practices around the island called "Isla Viva".