Wrriten by Lisa Palmer, Simon Connor, Pedro Vieira, Cancio da Costa and Ajenes Vieira
Tourism is often touted as the jewel in Timor-Leste’s crown. Timor comprises a mosaic of unique cultures, landscapes and experiences. It is a place that gets under people’s skin and into their hearts. For a decade the University of Melbourne Geography program has collaborated with the Dili-based NGO Haburas Foundation to organise an annual intensive student field class to Timor-Leste. Over the years we have returned repeatedly and built relationships with communities in Lautem, Maubisse and Atauro. These relationships are grounded in the Haburas Foundation’s long-term work assisting these communities to establish and operate community-governed tourism ventures underpinned by people’s deep connections and obligations to each other, their ancestors, their lands and waters.
Prior to the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic we would travel each year to Valu Sere and Jaco on the farthest tip of Timor-Leste. This is a powerful place where the sun rises off the water and the male and female seas meet. It is a place rich in living cultural sites and practices and oral histories of inter- and intra-island exchange. The Fataluku-speaking population in Tutuala maintain strong ancestral connections with their landscapes and a deep knowledge of the biodiversity of the region—most poignantly demonstrated in their knowledge of forest medicines and foods.
Each year when we visit Valu Sere our students hear presentations from the community about their long struggle to establish their ratu (clan)-based tourism venture and about the critical support they have received from the Haburas Foundation. With tears in their eyes, they reflect on hardship, but also on the strength and benefits this initiative has brought them. Each year our students walk with these community members from the pandanus fringed beach of Valu Sere inland through the tropical forests, ascending multiple karst terraces and stopping periodically to learn about Fataluku forest foods and medicines.
At the top of this ascent is the Lene Hara cave. There the students learn from community members about their ancestral connections to the site, about the stories of their early ancestors, as well as ancestral stories of the seas rising and falling. The students marvel at how these stories resonate with those of their university geography lecturer who has told them uncannily similar stories of seas rising and falling over millennia to create the karst terraced landscape we had just walked.
The students hear too from the community about their struggles to maintain control over their cultural heritage and ancestral places during the intense archaeological investigations which have been carried out in the region since independence. They hear about how cultural artefacts had been taken from the caves and not returned; about how ancestral remains have been disturbed. They are also told about local people dying as a result of ancestral retribution for these transgressions.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic our field class itinerary has changed, and we have not yet returned to Valu Sere. However, in mid-2026, the authors of this paper returned to communicate to community leaders some preliminary results of past research into the environmental history of the region. We also filmed some community cultural practices for a film we are making as another form of science communication, embedding Indigenous knowledge and practices in conversation with these scientific research results.
As we descended down the road from Tutuala to the Valu Sere beach we saw a new ticket gate at the top of the descent and a large car park at the bottom. Along the main road we also saw signage pointing the way for tourists to visit various archaeological sites. All this indicated that the government has plans to attract large-scale tourism to the region.
While we were staying at the Valu Sere Community Tourism Cooperative, our colleagues from Haburas organised for a Fataluku woman from the Cooperative to take us on a forest walk to show us forest foods and medicines. Also staying at Valu Sere were a large group of foreign adults and children based in Dili. They had also organised for a local guide to take them by road to visit the Lene Hara archaeological site. The woman who would guide us on the forest walk was on her mobile phone trying to organise for the appropriate ratu (clan) member to guide the larger group to the Lene Hara site. She had made it clear it was not appropriate for her to guide this larger group.
It was a busy day in Valu Sere with a concurrent community event ‘Clean up the Sea Day’ hosting the Municipal Administrator, the Lautem police and many other government employees. It took the woman some time to locate the appropriate guide. Meanwhile, the group of adults grew increasingly agitated. Their cars were ready and their children were waiting. We learnt that one of them had worked as a former advisor to the State Secretariat for Art and Culture. Yet the group were seemingly oblivious to the need for the local community to properly coordinate this visit among themselves according to their own cultural protocols.
The implications of this new fast track way to engage with the region’s cultural heritage became evident as we began our forest walk in the direction of the Lene Hara cave. We stopped on several occasions to film our guide explaining various local forest medicines and foods. Some distance into the walk our guide, and two young men from the appropriate ratu who were accompanying us, realised that we had lost the path. Since the State Secretariat for Art and Culture had put in the road to the archaeological site neither visitors nor locals were now using the previously well-trodden path which runs past Lene Hara Cave between Tutuala and Valu Sere. Presumably, many visitors to the area now visit the Lene Hara site unguided in their own vehicles.
The decision of the State Secretariat for Art and Culture to erect signs and build a road directly into the so-called Lena Hara archeological site was undoubtedly an attempt at heritage preservation and tourism promotion. Yet opening the doors to large-scale, unguided tourism also has the potential to undermine the local community’s authority and self-determination in relation to responsible visitor engagement with their living culture, heritage and environment. The loss of the walking track is just one demonstration of the danger of losing control over both local cultural authority and knowledge practices.
The Timorese government is seeking to have the rock arts sites of the region added to the UNESCO world heritage list as a part of a priority cultural heritage site called the ‘Archeological Rock Art Sites of Tutuala in Nino Konis Santana National Park’. It is unclear the extent to which this government and expert-led process will include local clans and what the ongoing implications for them will be for tourist visitation to the area. UNESCO requires that there should be effective consultation with local clans and affirmation of their culture, customs and governance authority.
Haburas Foundation have long been critical enablers of community-based tourism in Timor-Leste. Some of these community ventures like Fatin Hak Matek in Maubisse continue to receive a semi-regular smattering of day visitors. Yet since the Covid-19 pandemic it is rare for them to receive overnight visitors. With new roads, tourists now have the option to come and go from Dili in one day. While Valu Sere is too far from Dili for a day trip, new roads, carparks and government authorised signage pointing visitors directly to archaeological sites are arguably diminishing both the visitor experience and community control and knowledge over their sacred sites. Timor-Leste’s unique landscapes and cultures are made most powerful and attractive to tourists because of the ancient and still vibrant connections between people and place. While large-scale, self-guided visits to government sanctioned heritage sites can be found all over Southeast Asia, often these sites have already sacrificed the deeper connections and control exercised by local communities.
Timorese civil society organisations such as Haburas have worked tirelessly to assist communities to establish locally-controlled tourism ventures and ensure community governance over these places and landscapes. This is difficult community work which demands a high degree of cultural capacity and long-term commitment. It is work that needs ongoing government and donor support. While government or privately run tourism ventures continuously come and go in independent Timor-Leste, communities always stay. Timor-Leste is unlikely ever to be a destination for mass tourism. Conversely, there is a proven market for the right kind of boutique community-based tourism.
Yet supporting this long-term community-based approach to tourism governance and sacred living landscapes is the antithesis of current government and donor culture approaches to tourism development in Timor-Leste. Arguably the people who work in these institutions know well these issues and even some of the solutions. The problem seems to be their unwillingness to change the established order of who benefits from such arrangements of centralised power and privilege.
