From tea monoculture to rural tourism: Variegated ruralities in Çamlıhemşin, Turkey

This article examines how rural tourism transforms livelihoods, attachments, and land claims in the Çamlıhemşin district of Turkey's Eastern Black Sea region. Building on recent ruralisation scholarship, it integrates tourism, overlooked in these debates despite its growing role in rural landscapes, into the analytical framework, and extends discussions developed primarily through Southeast Asian cases to a setting where tourism intersects with a longstanding tea economy and decades of rural–urban migration. Drawing on participant observation and open-ended interviews conducted during fieldwork in 2025, the findings show that tea cultivation produced variegated ruralities: coastal villages sustained livelihoods through tea, while settlements deeper in the valley combined small-scale cultivation with circular urban migration. These mobility patterns preserved village properties, kinship networks, and land attachments across distance, laying the material groundwork for tourism's emergence. As tea income declined and regional development shifted towards tourism, inherited assets became activatable through three mechanisms: converting mansions and highland cottages into rental properties (spatial value-activation), generating local employment beyond agriculture (labour market formation), and symbolically revaluing rural residence. Tourism, however, does not produce uniform outcomes: its interaction with pre-existing resource configurations yields divergent trajectories, from mass, construction-intensive development where agriculture persists to more eco-sensitive tourism where it has almost ceased. The article concludes that tourism constitutes a distinct form of ruralisation in which rural life persists not despite deagrarianisation but through the re-functioning of inherited rural assets into visitor economies.