Regional Destination Management Program for Puerto Rico’s El Yunque National Forest

Tourism in northeastern Puerto Rico continues to rise, with more than one million people visiting El Yunque annually. A key emphasis of the project is to identify opportunities for tourism development that are most likely to generate local economic, social, and environmental value for the El Yunque region.

From April 2025-March 2026, a multidisciplinary team has been performing a sustainable tourism assessment in the Northeast region of Puerto Rico. This work examines tourism business markets and supply chains, reviews the feasibility of using geospatial planning for monitoring the impacts of the growth of tourism, develops strategic approaches to the development of sustainable infrastructure in the region and designs tourism policy and governance pathways for managing tourism growth.  The focus is on a regional route, PR-186, road, which runs through the municipalities of Río Grande and Canóvanas, where important El Yunque assets, such as the Espíritu Santo River Observation Point and the historic properties of Casa Cubuy and El Verde Ranger House, are located.

Five partner companies are collaborating with STAMP on these analyses:

• Estudios Tecnicos analyzed how to build a GIS Sustainable Tourism Regional Planning Hub to provide evidence based mapped data to evaluate the potential and future local economic, environmental, and social impacts of tourism to guide long-term sustainable tourism development planning.
• Local Guest Collective will establish a set of recommendations for broader alternative tourism supply chain development required for sustainable tourism development to be successful along PR-186.
• Sinfranova analyzed current infrastructure status in Puerto Rico, including energy, solid waste, wastewater, and internet in the El Yunque Region and recommended sustainable infrastructure and financing solutions  as tourism in the PR-186 region increases over the next five years.
• Soledad Gaztambide will identify policy and governance pathways to help the El Yunque region to successfully implement and finance the necessary sustainable infrastructure and create a collaborative local governance system which can oversee sustainable development in the region, manage financing to accommodate and monitor the new alternative tourism programs being designed, and achieve full engagement of local stakeholders and municipalities to manage the growth of tourism.
• Solimar International supported work to identify alternative tourism market segments and products in the El Yunque Region (including adventure tourism, ecotourism, cultural tourism, agritourism, gastronomy, educational tourism, wellness tourism, and social impact/volunteerism).