To strengthen the economy, the focus is on attracting visitors. But the growth of slow and sustainable tourism is the only viable path to developing the travel sector without destroying places that are, for the most part, still untouched.

Nargiza leans across the table with the discretion of someone who doesn't want to intrude. She sets down a small plate of fruit and a teapot with a beaded bracelet tied around the handle. One of those bracelets that the women in her family make to sell to passing tourists.

We are in the mountains of northern Tajikistan, at the end of a dirt track dotted with lakes that locals still travel today on the backs of mules. In the stream that turns the mill a few metres away, two girls are washing clothes, crouching over the water.

Nargiza asks with a gesture of her hand whether she can take the plates away: unlike her brother, she doesn't speak English, but she finds a way to communicate with foreign visitors all the same. You don't see too many of them around here, but the numbers are growing.

Nargiza's family has opened a guest house in the mountains of Tajikistan. One of those guest houses that the government is trying to promote in order to grow tourism in this remote Central Asian country.

"Tourists around here are increasing. That's why we expanded the guest house," says Nargiza's brother, Said, opening the door of the stone-and-brick annex where his family has set up around fifteen beds with shared bathrooms. "In high season we're fully booked almost every day," Said tells LifeGate. The rooms are spartan and look out onto a small poplar grove framed by the mountains. In the morning, breakfast is made with produce they grow themselves.

Most of the visitors who come here are American. Europeans are fewer, and they tend to come mainly from Germany and France.

Although it lies off the most well-trodden tourist circuits, Tajikistan has in recent years begun to attract lovers of trekking, mountaineering and cycling. And now the authorities are aiming to develop the ecotourism sector by 2030, as set out in the Tourism Development Strategy ratified by President Emomali Rahmon — the longest-serving leader among the countries of the former Soviet Union, who has governed Tajikistan with an authoritarian hand since 1992. His giant portraits are displayed almost everywhere: in the squares of the main cities and in the courtyards of village schools.

Composed of more than ninety per cent mountains, with peaks reaching as high as seven thousand metres, Tajikistan has enormous potential for ecotourism development. Consider the glaciers of Somoni Peak, the highest summit in the former Soviet Union and an unspoilt jewel of the Pamir mountain range; or the Gorno-Badakhshan National Park, listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site; or the crystal-clear waters of Lake Yashikul, as well as the archaeological remains of Sarazm, which bear witness to settlements in Central Asia between the fourth and third millennia BC.

In short, this country's tourism potential is enormous. But the obstacles are still many, starting with absent or crumbling infrastructure, a lack of qualified staff, insufficient air connections, and a scarcity of transport links. "They've now built a new road that makes it easier to travel between the mountain passes in the north of the country," Said explains. But across the rest of the country, connections would certainly need to be strengthened.

The bet has been placed, however. And Tajikistan is now trying to develop slow and sustainable tourism in order to diversify and strengthen an economy that remains very fragile, despite an upward curve.

Even though Tajikistan's tourism economy has posted rising figures in recent years — with a growth rate that last year exceeded 8 per cent of GDP — the level of poverty, according to the World Bank, is still very high: 20.4 per cent of the population in 2023. The Tajik economy is also particularly exposed to external vulnerabilities, given that almost half of GDP (49 per cent) depends on remittances from workers who have emigrated abroad, mostly to Russia.

In an attempt to stabilise the country, the government of Emomali Rahmon has set itself an ambitious goal: to double or even triple the population's incomes between 2016 and 2030. A challenge that requires investment and a new growth model centred on a dynamic private sector.

To create jobs and diversify the economy, the government is therefore betting on tourism, identified as one of the levers for the country's socio-economic growth.

Concrete signals of this direction can be found in official press releases that give prominence to the International Tourism Forum organised at the end of June in the city of Kulyab; they report on the rise in tourist numbers in the Gorno-Badakhshan region, where the art of embroidery and weaving is handed down through generations; and they show Emomali Rahmon visiting the new ethnographic village inaugurated in the district of Darvoz.

The real challenge, however, will be finding the right balance between tourism development and the protection of the territory and cultural heritage. A heritage that is still rooted today in centuries-old traditions and ways of life, which risk being distorted by the arrival of aggressive, unregulated tourism.

Speculative construction, damage to ecosystems, loss of authenticity and the folklorisation of local cultures are effects that have already been seen elsewhere: Tajikistan can still avoid them, by choosing a different path.

"There is no other possible way to develop the Tajik tourism industry than ecotourism," Eleonora Sacco, founder of Kukushka Tours — a tour operator specialising in travel to former Soviet Union countries — told LifeGate. "Outside the two main cities, Dushanbe and Khujand, the country's infrastructure is extremely limited, not least because of the harsh and difficult geography of the territory."

According to data from the Tajikistan Statistics Agency, in the first nine months of 2024 the country welcomed 1.2 million foreign visitors, 19 per cent more than in the same period the previous year. The vast majority come from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the organisation that brings together nine former Soviet states, including — in order of numbers visiting Tajikistan — Uzbekistan, Russia and Kazakhstan.

Beyond the former Soviet bloc countries, last year Tajikistan was visited mainly by people from China (21,600), Afghanistan (10,400), the United States (9,200), Iran (6,800), Turkey (6,100) and Germany (5,200). Italy also features in the rankings, but you have to scroll down to the lower positions to find it.

"Unlike other Central Asian regimes that in recent decades have built more or less failed mega-resorts inspired by the Gulf states — such as Silk Road Samarkand in Uzbekistan, the tourist city of Turkistan in Kazakhstan, or the colossal empty hotels overlooking an ever-retreating Caspian Sea at Awaza in Turkmenistan — Tajikistan has no postcard cities served by international airports, sandy coastlines or futuristic architecture by star architects where mass-tourist resorts could be built," Eleonora Sacco explains to LifeGate.

Already well known among cycling travel enthusiasts, Tajikistan attracts those who love spartan journeys in remote areas, in contact with ways of life very different from contemporary European ones. In remote areas, the population still lives by livestock farming and subsistence agriculture, in traditional houses and villages, often without basic infrastructure such as sewage, electricity and water networks.

In short, the path towards slow and sustainable tourism development is still full of obstacles. But it is undoubtedly the only viable path to growing a sector — that of travel — which would otherwise risk destroying places that are, for the most part, still untouched.

"In environments with such extreme climates and such delicate, vulnerable nature, thinking of creating infrastructure for mass tourism would be a catastrophe, as well as a utopia," Eleonora Sacco concludes. "One of the solutions perhaps least impactful on the local population would be the CBT (Community Based Tourism) model, already active for many years in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan, which aims to preserve the way of life of rural communities, improving infrastructure without distorting the fabric of villages and small towns, and creating extra income for families, so that they don't have to leave their valleys to find work in Dushanbe or abroad.