You are creating a sustainable, lovely, fair-labor beach resort in the state of Bahia, Brazil. Unfortunately, a less-than-fair local establishment doesn’t appreciate it – stressing their point with an act of demolition. The Uxua hotel’s co-owner Bob Shevlin describes the process then needed to rework community relations.
“Going it Alone” With Your New Resort May Not Be Wise
International hoteliers do not like to see their new business knocked down by a bulldozer. For any reason, let alone because they practiced sustainable tourism. But we learned that anything is possible when you attempt to go it alone against well-entrenched cycles of corruption.
In my defense, the goal was to do something disruptive in a new industry and a new place. We were trying to set an aspirational conservation example so that it might catch media attention for the very fact of it being so unlikely. How I arrived at this challenge is a bit of a roundabout story.
Testing Our Sustainability Vision
In the midst of a 20-year run in the fashion industry in Europe, marked by good luck earning royalties from corporate partners like the Italian brand Diesel, we recognized that we were having less luck with overdue environmental initiatives in the industry such as prioritization of organic fabrics and dyes and non-polluting production methods.
So designer-partner Wilbert Das and I sought an opportunity to focus our skills on projects closer to those values. We turned our sights to a climate and culture we loved: Bahia, Brazil and a segment new to us, travel and hospitality design.
There we began an entrepreneurial adventure.
Decamping to the sub-tropical coast of Bahia and restoring centuries-old fishermen houses in the heart of a colonial fishing village called Trancoso, we began to execute experiments which merged antique craftsmanship with contemporary design twists. We used reclaimed materials and added a dose of best environmental practice – which by now should be standard practice – by investing in a solar farm and incorporating it into our own organic farm.
We opened the Uxua Casa Hotel & Spa in late 2008 to substantial media acclaim for the delivery of a project that could boast both legitimate sustainability credentials and innovative and impactful design. Uxua scooped a 12-page feature in Vogue magazine and the cover of Architectural Digest among others.
Aiming for Change
Trancoso at the time had tourism principally only during the New Year’s period. With the summer high season being extremely short, very little formal employment existed across the sector. We aimed to change that.
From the get-go we offered our 50-person team permanent contracts and benefits such as healthcare. To my surprise, far from earning us appreciation in the village, it earned us a few enemies. We upset a couple of neighboring businesses owners who’d worked for years to convince the local workforce that formal employment was a trick to steal their money via taxation. Job protections guaranteed by government to registered workers, they said, was no more than fool’s gold.
Our image as destabilizers cost us significantly over the next few years. We wanted to advance our vision to the next stage and create effective community-based environmental and educational nonprofit institutions. None of that materialized. While we attracted some incredibly talented collaborators and one or two motivated donors, we were also ignored by most stakeholders and potential partners. For many in the local tourism industry, we were seen as too extreme—gringo idealists who didn’t see the local political dynamic through a realistic lens.
“We were seen as too extreme—gringo idealists who didn’t see
the local political dynamic through a realistic lens.”
This was true even though almost all the initiatives we had supported were sustainable-tourism basics. Our view was that rudimentary planning and fundamental rules are required for all “green” destinations.
The isolation we found ourselves in meant that for every successful environmental action achieved by our nonprofit conservation allies, our own business would suffer reprisal. Most of the gains were related to preventing public officials from selling illicit development licenses within protected areas. Those in local government who felt threatened by the environmental movement treated the Uxua Casa Hotel & Spa as something of a piñata. They attacked Uxua with endless fiscal raids, sanitary inspections, rejections of operating licenses, and every form of harassment imaginable.
Then, in December 2014, they arrived with a city-owned tractor to destroy our beach club in front of shocked employees and clients. They bulldozed a structure voted the No. 7 Beach Lounge in the world by CNN. It was in perfect harmony with nature and the local culture, and had been featured in Condé Nast Traveler, Travel & Leisure, and the Times of London as a showcase sustainable destination.
A successful civil action against the municipal government in 2017, led by the sustainable tourism NGO Association Despertar Trancoso, which we had supported, led to greater disruption than the damage to our beach business. Our brand and personal names began to appear in political propaganda and media across the region.
We endured nearly a year of fake news about “foreign activists here to destroy jobs and suffocate the economy.” Newspaper stories claimed that the 16th century village church would be torn down to accommodate an expanding Uxua. And the entire historical center of town would only be accessible to “rich tourists.” Lies.
New Strategy
While 2017 was a low point in terms of harassment, we were embarking on a new tactic that grew from seeds planted a few years prior – building trust and alliances with local travel industry partners.
Taking advantage of international media interest in our project – old contacts from our years in the fashion world delivered for us – we began to prioritize PR opportunities for neighboring businesses. Instead of talking about ourselves in interviews, we talked about our community, giving generous praise to others, often crediting them with inspiring us. That was legitimate. We would not have settled in Trancoso if we hadn’t fallen in love with its countless tourism attributes in the first place.
As I learned the histories of neighboring businesses, I started to spot unique details. I shared with them what I thought would be good marketing opportunities. And so we became partners in telling the stories of other hotels and restaurants, and of the many artisans and artists who work in Trancoso. To this day the Uxua website has a section called Arts & Artisans that publishes the work of craftsmen, photographers, and other area creatives.
Building the promotional narrative as a collective story led to a run of great destination pieces by major travel media and in-flight magazines. All recounted a charming tale of a kind of “utopia.” Eventually Li Edelkoort, a former Parsons Design School professor who created the school’s sustainability program published a 288-page art book titled Uxua Utopia, A Very Gifted Guesthouse. The book is dedicated to the spirit of the circular economy we advocate and features many of our neighbors and collaborators.
A Local Festival Kicks Off a National Alliance
A community-wide manifestation of this collective work became what is the now renowned Organic Festival Trancoso. Any business could participate free of charge and with the guarantee of visibility in national media stories about sustainable tourism. The central thread: Branding Trancoso as a destination of green-spirited, democratic collaborators, all extending goodwill to each other.
From the success of the Organic Festival was born the nationwide Futuri Regenerative Tourism Alliance, launched in 2020 with Conservation International Brazil, where I was a board member. Futuri’s aim was to make sustainability a philosophy relevant to all segments of the tourism industry and its supply chain, not just for wealthy businesses able to invest in recycling and solar panels.
Futuri recruited some 200 member-partners in its first year, gaining media attention across all of Brazil including in top economic newspaper, Valor Economico.
“The message for all is that coalition building
in tourism is the path for affecting change.”
This national momentum supported the founding in 2024 of a commercial association for our by-now influential destination: Organização Turismo de Trancoso. OTT is our most effective local tool to date, with a manifesto based on the most progressive sustainability practices and standards. In my opinion, OTT is truly world class.
From Pariah to Partner
The Organic Festival, the national weight of the Futuri Alliance, and the founding of OTT marked a moment of change for local public officials. The overwhelming union of leading businesses, satellite sectors of retail and arts, and multiple third sector partners simply made it impossible for opponents to continue fighting sustainability. Suddenly, instead of campaigns of harassment, our associations were offered seats on tourism councils and were issued grants for projects.
Going from pariah to public partner seemed a miracle. The message for all was that coalition building in tourism is the path for affecting change. We had learned that while setting a lone example might be noble, it risks being perceived as an announcement of superiority in conservation credentials or values. That can alienate the community instead of selling sustainability.
Humility, generosity, investing in relationships and sharing prosperity – always avoiding the appearance of wanting to “possess” the word sustainable – is the way to make it a label that everyone wants to share.
Alliances of course take time to nurture. For us, it took ten years of focused work from the 2014 destruction of our beach club. The process required a lot of insight and trial and error, a lot of listening and learning. Sustainable tourism principles may be easy to understand, but it’s not so easy to identify how to sell its advantages to different stakeholders, each with their own personal motivations and biases.
It worked. By 2024, local businesses were working in close collaboration on sustainability, even financing a delegation to represent Trancoso at COP30 in Belem, Brazil, in October 2025.
Back to the Beach
Our beach club is thriving today. The promotor (a kind of Brazilian public prosecutor) who ordered its demolition using bogus documentation has been recently removed from office. As part of an investigation nicknamed the Justice League, he and other officials were taken out, charged with multiple counts of corruption for selling illicit building licenses and various other environmental crimes.
In 2014, we rebuilt our beach club in just six weeks – a very public gesture of resistance. It now is the site of one of Trancoso’s most well-known annual events, the Organic Festival Trancoso Luau. Held to celebrate the end of each year’s festival, the party involves the entire community. Celebrity musicians come and donate a free show. Last year 2,000 attended and celebrated our collective sustainability mission. It was one of the most inspiring things I’ve seen in my work, a real symbol of hope for the future.
A life-long activist for human rights and the environment, Bob Shevlin (www.uxua.com) makes a career in design and travel. He sits on the boards of Conservation International Brazil and CREST.