Sustainable Tourism Law

LEGAL PROTECTION OF SUSTAINABLE TOURISM IN BRAZIL 419 “Art. 17. The act which declares Special Area of Tourist Interest, of the category of Reservation shall include: (...) III – the agencies and entities that shall participate in the preservation of these characteristics.” At this point, we see obligations of a distinct nature, which also have different effects. One of them refers to the preservation of the physical space, as a consequence of the cultural and natural assets included in it regarding the owners’ responsibility, which may be states and municipalities or the Federal Government itself. This is, no doubt, a kind of responsibility that arises from the condition of title holder, equating legal entities of public or private law in relation to the performance of the obligation. Another possibility is to implement the defined plans and programmes, where the obligation of states and municipalities is of a programmatic nature, while the individual remains as a passive subject of the implementation or not. And when holding this position, the law does not contemplate any right that may be exercised by it, especially as to exonerate itself from the undefined responsibility for the integrity of the assets that it possesses or to reassume full ownership over them. In other words, when the Special Area of Tourist Interest has been established, there is no provision requiring the drawing up of plans and programmes, let alone implementing them, nor a deadline for this to happen. Thus, the use restriction that the declaration institutionalizes is definitive, and it does not have the specific resources to raise those restrictions if the plans and programmes are not developed or implemented. However, based on the constitutional guarantee of the property right, the individual will be able to annul the declaration, provided that the movable or immovable property that he owns are not, in parallel, protected by legislation of another order. The legislator should have established a deadline for the Estate’s planning action to be carried out, at the risk of perpetuating a restriction without a cause and devoid of any consideration. The Estate cannot, when intervening on the tourist economic domain, indefinitely restrict the full exercise of the property right, by failing to comply with the legal obligation to implement plans and programmes for an area or location of tourist interest in which it is situated.