Ittoqqortoormiit and the National Park of Greenland: a community's option for tourism development

Abstract

Landscape and culture are among the topics that make a place attractive for tourists. Protected areas, used also for leisure purposes, represent good development opportunities for the neighbouring communities. The National Park of Greenland has adopted new regulations and leisure activities will be allowed in its area. This will represent an opportunity of increasing the tourism business in Ittoqqortoormiit, the adjacent community to the park, which is suffering from a difficult economic situation. This new use of the resources in the protected area may well serve as engine for growth and revitalization of the local economy that has a chronic lack of jobs and an important outmigration. In this article are presented some of the results of interviews done in 2009 with the Inuit of Ittoqqortoormiit regarding tourism. The goal of the project ‘Community-based tourism as an option for concrete, viable development in peripheral, remote places’ was to investigate how a small Inuit community, peripheral and remote, which has traditional subsistence activities, but low incomes and high unemployment rate, could seek economic alternatives in tourism.