When Zita Cobb was 10, her hometown almost disappeared. Not just her hometown, but all of the communities on Fogo Island, the island off Newfoundland where Ms. Cobb was born in 1958. The crisis was triggered by the collapse of the near-shore cod fishery, a resource that had sustained her ancestral community since the 17th century. In response, the Newfoundland government proposed to resettle the population to other parts of the province — or somewhere.
“I remember my parents whispering in the night, and my mother saying, ‘What’s going to happen to us? Where are we going to end up?’ And my dad saying, ‘I don’t know.’ It’s terrifying for a child,” Ms. Cobb remembered during a recent interview.
“They had no running water, no electricity. They had little health care and no roads. And suddenly — there was no fish,” Ms. Cobb said. “There was a real risk of starvation.”
But the communities of Fogo Island formed a cooperative and asked the government’s support to build a small shipyard so they could build boats that would allow them to fish farther offshore. And it worked. The people of Fogo Island were not resettled. And they did not starve.
In 2013, Ms. Cobb drew on that same innovative community spirit in establishing the luxury Fogo Island Inn, which has since earned “three keys” from the Michelin Guide. The island was included in the Travel section’s annual “Places to Go” feature in 2011 and 2022. Ms. Cobb says that the inn is an expression of the island’s culture — in everything from the way guests are greeted right off the ferry to the ingredients used in the inn’s dining room to the locally made furnishings in the inn’s 29 rooms.
She hopes other places might draw inspiration from her work to create an economic model in which tourism is in service to the community — not the other way around. To that end, she has developed a new network that aims to “activate the assets of local places.”
“We’re not trying to capture value,” said Ms. Cobb. “We’re trying to create value.”
Recently, we talked about what’s wrong with tourism today, what to do on Fogo Island, and why Ms. Cobb doesn’t like tipping. The following are edited excerpts from those conversations.
This summer we saw some negative reactions to tourism, including the protests in Barcelona. What’s your reaction to that?
Too many places go into the tourism sector as a way of supporting the things they love, and of course it’s a dance with the devil because you can lose control of the scale very quickly.
I think places — communities — don’t have enough awareness of the real value of the assets they have. And they don’t perhaps have enough knowledge around how to develop those assets in a way that can make for a successful industry that can strengthen culture. If you look at all of the manifestations of cultural decline or social challenges, generally speaking underneath that is the failure of an economy to support the people in the place where they live. So I think the economy is the best intervention point.
How do we make sure that tourism supports communities, not destroys them?
There’s a whole mind-set shift that has to happen, both for travelers and in the communities that host them. I don’t think anybody, just because they can afford it, has a divine right to go anywhere they want, whenever they want. I think what we have to be clear about is the invitation. And when you see the various barriers that communities like Barcelona are starting to put in place, that is trying to shape the invitation. I think a lot of work has to happen inside of communities to figure out how to do that.
Tell me about growing up on Fogo Island.
It was a pretty idyllic childhood in a place that had very little contact with the mainland. We fished in family units in small wooden boats that we made ourselves. We traded our fish with a merchant who would give us credit at their company store. We controlled all of the decisions that we made about how we lived, except we didn’t control — and we didn’t understand — how the market worked, which was the great weakness, of course.
When I was 10, my father saw the collapse of the inshore fishery. He told me, “When you grow up, you’re going to have go away and figure out how this money thing works. You have to study business. Because if we don’t understand how this works, it’s going to eat everything we love.” So I studied business, and I had a career in wave-division multiplexing, which are the little optical components that have enabled the digital age.
What led you back home?
I always visited home. And when my career was coming to an end, I started a scholarship program here. We were doing a review of the program, and a woman stood up in a meeting and said, “You’re just paying our kids to leave. Can’t you do something to make work here?” So two of my brothers and I asked ourselves, “How do we put another leg on the economy in a way that strengthens culture?”
We asked a series of questions: What do we have, what do we know, what do we love, what do we miss and what can we do about it? These are the basics of asset-based community development.
This is a deeply, deeply hospitable culture — and it is a geographically remarkable place. And so that’s what led us to hospitality and tourism.
What’s it like to visit Fogo Island?
Most people who come will end up hiking and walking all of the ancient paths that go along the coast. It’s a rugged island — big enough to get lost in and to be intriguing, but small enough to navigate and love.
Almost all of our guests spend time with community hosts. Some hosts will give you an orientation of the island, which has 11 communities that are culturally quite different. The next day, the guests and the host might go out hiking or fishing together. There’s a woman on the island named Joan who makes a lot of jams and cakes, so there are people going to Joan’s house. Or you might go out berry picking, or fishing for cod with someone who’s retired.
Our presumption is that one of the reasons we travel is that we’re nosy. And so, how do you bring people together so that we can learn from each other?
Our all-inclusive rates start at 2,475 Canadian dollars (or about $1,780). That’s not a small amount of money, but it’s very good value for both the guests and our local community.
You mentioned that you discourage tipping on Fogo Island. Why?
I think the hardest thing in modern-day tourism is to try to get an even playing field between guest and host. And when you hand over $20, you’ve just diminished the person who’s just shared their home with you. You’ve transformed what just happened, which is actually a real human relationship, into a transaction.
We built our business model to serve the people of the island, which means we don’t need tipping. This past year, 53 percent of the money people spent at the inn went to the people who work there. In most business models, that’s 30 percent.
Do you hope other communities will follow in your footsteps?
There’s a late professor, Gill-Chin Lim, who said that we have to create a global network of intensely local places. So it’s the opposite of the flattening of the earth and the flattening of culture and this mind-numbing sameness that we’re doing to ourselves. But if you start from the places themselves, and if you start with the intention of properly developing the things that we have and the things that we love, then you’re going to have a world of very specific and joyful places. As opposed to starting from an industry model that says, “Oh, we figured out how to build this. Let’s build a million of them and put them everywhere.”
So yes, we’re now working to build a network for place-based economies — and tourism is an important part of it.
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