EnglishBy Jason G. Goldman
One of the best places in the world to see whales in their natural habitat is in Latin America. The waters around the continent include some 64 species of whales and dolphins: about three-quarters of the planet’s total cetacean biodiversity. That might explain why whale watching tourism has grown around 11% each year there, a rate that three times the annual growth of global tourism and nearly five times the annual growth of Latin American tourism more generally. In Central America, the numbers are even more impressive, with (pre-pandemic) annual growth in whale tourism of some 47%. This is the second fastest growing whale watching industry in the world.
Whales are found throughout the Pacific and Caribbean coasts of Central America, but most cetacean (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) tourism is situated in just a few countries: Mexico, Costa Rica and Panama. Together, these three countries account for a whopping 97 percent of all whale watching operations in Central America, according to a 2008 report published by the International Fund for Animal Welfare and the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.
But other countries are working hard to earn a piece of that business. In 2006, for example, El Salvador established a marine protected area off the Pacific coast of Los Cóbanos, west of San Salvador, near the Guatemala border. Ten years later, in the 2014-2015 whale watching season, about 400 whale watching tourists had participated in sixty-five expeditions, generating more than $14,000 worth of revenue for whale watch operators in the area. As whale watching tourism has grown in this small community – thanks in part to local fishermen who no longer spend one hundred percent of their time fishing – so has tourism more generally. More hostels and lodges are being built, some of which offer their own in-house whale watching activities, bringing even more revenue to the Los Cóbanos area.
These small businesses aren’t in it alone. One of the most important things that the federal government has done is to publish a set of best practices for sustainable whale watching activities, most recently updated in 2019. These guidelines help business owners to ensure that the whales themselves are not overstressed by the presence of tourism boats.
For example, the mandate that any group of whales can only be continuously observed by a maximum of two boats for thirty minutes. The regulations specify that cetaceans should only be approached from in front rather than behind, to avoid spooking the animals, and that the boats must maintain a distance of 100 meters – and 200 meters for blue whales, which themselves can reach nearly 30 meters in length. The government also provides guidelines for how to respond if a boat accidentally strikes a whale or dolphin, or if somebody spots an injured animal.
None of this would have been possible without the collaboration of Paso Pacifíco, which has been officially tasked with coordinating best practices for wildlife-related tourism by El Salvador’s Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources.
“Los Cóbanos is where the bulk of the action is in terms of whale tourism; there’s been a lot of humpback whale tourism in the last two or three years,” says Paso Pacífico executive director Sarah Otterstrom, especially since the government has cleared up the gang-related violence that used to be common in the area. She explains further that “There’s been a lot of investment by international NGOs” in maintaining sustainable wildlife tourism in the region. This tourism also includes SCUBA and snorkel activities centered on the area’s protected coral reef ecosystem.
In the meantime, some three hundred kilometers southeast, in the Gulf of Fonseca, researchers have now documented twenty-one cetacean species, including some that are rare or vulnerable to extinction. Members of the communities there are now looking to Los Cóbanos as a model for establishing a sustainable whale-based tourism economy of their own.
Header: Humpback whales seen in Los Cóbanos, El Salvador. By Flickr user zambomba; used under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.