Challenges of transitioning a traditional mining region into a community-based tourism destination

Many mining regions have recently opted for a combination of mining and tourism, although this may seem dichotomous and borderline surreal from a sustainability point of view. The mine is considered destructive of the landscape and natural resources essential for tourism practices (Chirita, Schmitz, 2017). Worse, it is associated with enslavement and poverty (Lebigre, 2008). However, several mining territories are full of attractive elements linked to the mine or not. One of the largest bauxite mining areas in the world, Boké in Guinea is also a region with a rich and varied tourism potential. Research suggests that developing tourism resources could provide an effective response to poverty and the protection of threatened areas in this region if governance measures that promote tourism resources can be used to improve the quality of the tourism sector. Moreover, developing tourism activities in parallel with mining is a good option for economic diversification to reduce the mine's influence on the region and facilitate the tourism conversion of brownfield sites in the post-mining period. This could involve allocating part of the mining royalties to the development of tourist facilities, opening up the sites thanks to the infrastructure created for the mines, creating an attractiveness around bauxite, etc., which would establish links between mining and tourism from a local development perspective, rather than opposing the two activities. The communication aims to synthesize some experience of tourism development worldwide and point out the measures that could apply to the Guinean context.