What happens when the tourists stop coming?

Deep in the late September heat, I found myself on the island of Bastimientos.

It’s a tiny speck of land in the Caribbean; a small tropical island where jungles of tangled mangrove meet the sea.

Here, the houses are bright and colorful and jut out over the water on stilts. Life is quiet and quaint.

At face value, it’s paradise.

After my last volunteering experience in Panama went awry, I was looking for a place to hide out and relax for a while. I arranged a stay with a small guesthouse on the island where I’d help out with housekeeping and greeting visitors.

When I arrived at the guesthouse, I was surprised to find that I was the only one there. It was just me and the groundskeeper on the sprawling jungle property: the house hadn’t seen any guests in months. Besides a handful of other tourists here and there, there were no other visitors on the island.

It was a ghost town.

In June of 2025, the multinational banana-producing giant Chiquita shut down their operations in Panama.

This triggered mass protests across the region from people who suddenly lost their livelihoods. In retaliation to the unrest, the Panamanian government cut the Bocas del Toro region off from the rest of Panama with road blocks and blockades. For weeks, the islands had no connection with the outside word; no electricity, no food or medicine. They were effectively left on their own.

The islands of the Bocas del Toro archipelago, however, rely on tourism as their only source of income. Everything here caters to tourism dollars, from the lone fish restaurants serving up ceviche and fried plantains to the mom-and-pop guest houses and boat tour companies.

When tourism becomes your only lifeline, what happens when it is suddenly taken away?

At the guesthouse, the groundkeeper Jorge spends the sun-soaked afternoons rocking away in a hammock, telling me stories about the island.

He promises me next week, they’ll be there. The guests will arrive soon, it’s just quiet season, that’s all. The visitors will blow in with the changing winds, the passing seasons. Maybe the coming rains will bring them our way.

But this heat has become unbearable.

On the island, everyone seems on the precipice. The lack of tourists hangs in the air like a bead of sweat that just won’t break.

The island’s sole road is lined with empty guesthouses. As the summer drones on, Bastimientos has become all but island in waiting, clinging on to hope for some economic respite.

With nowhere left to turn, some residents have gotten increasingly desperate.

My host warned me not to venture to the beaches alone, as armed robbers have been known to lurk in the jungle and wait for unsuspecting travelers. Just last week, Jorge tells me, a rogue gunman burst into the guesthouse demanding money from the guests.

Fortunately, no one was there at the time.

As the tourism situation grew more strained, I couldn’t help but wonder:

What happens to the guesthouse owner? The one who sweeps the floor for the guests that seemingly never arrive. What about the woman frying empanadas on the street corner to support her family?

What happens to them, then, when the tourists never come?

When we set up our entire economies around tourism, or any singular industry for that matter, we leave ourselves vulnerable to collapse when they fail.

All it takes is one catastrophic event or disaster for it to all come crashing down. As we’ve seen with the Pandemic, global travel can come to a screeching halt seemingly overnight.

Sustainable tourism (if that even exists) can never be the sole sustenance for a community. It can never take over a way of life or become people’s only economic lifeline.

Many of the islands we love to vacation in will be the first ones impacted by climate change. Just this year, we’ve seen Hurricane Melissa devastate communities across the Caribbean, many that rely on tourism for their way of life.

What happens when it takes too long for an island to rebuild after disaster? What happens when rebuilding becomes impossible?

Will we just rush off to the next one? What happens to those left behind, the ones left to deal with its aftermath?

What will be left then?