Acampamento Tibiriçá

On the site that was once Fazenda Val de Palmas – home to one of the largest coffee producers in Brazil in the mid-1890s – the Acampamento Tibiriçá has operated for more than 22 years. It arose from a trip the owner made to São Paulo, when she saw in a magazine ideas on how to set up a camp, at a time when little was yet said about “Rural Tourism.” In the 1980s, after a frost, the producer and her husband - Mr. Cynise Pereira Leite - bought the land from a family of Asian origin that had raised silkworms there. Since then the farm, which was later turned into a camp, has gone through some expansions, and now has 116 accommodations, the vast majority made up of the old sheds and barns from the silkworm-raising days. Today, Acampamento Tibiriçá focuses its efforts on developing rural tourism, but it still keeps ties to the routines of a family property, since coffee, sugarcane and corn for silage are grown there, the last two crops intended to feed the dairy cattle, whose milk is the raw material for the sweets produced locally.

With its main focus on rural tourism, Acampamento Tibiriçá offers an innovative tourism concept, “Educational Tourism,” opening its doors to various target audiences, especially children from preschool and elementary schools in the district of Tibiriçá, cities around Bauru and the region as a whole. Since educational tourism is an offshoot of rural tourism, camp visitors get a sense of life in the countryside: while they can milk a cow directly, they simultaneously learn basic math concepts from the cheese production process, and they are also treated to the “Folk Tale Storytelling” series, which draws on figures of Brazilian folklore, such as the Saci, from a story created by Mrs. Márcia that takes advantage of the mystique surrounding the property's vast bamboo grove. The first harvest of the coffee, planted in mid-May and June, goes through the roasting of the beans and continues until the coffee is made as a finished product, giving its name to one of the rural tourism attractions at the camp, the “From the Coffee Field to the Cup of Coffee” series.

The quality of the sweets produced at the camp itself is one of the key points behind the good reputation of Acampamento Tibiriçá, with the owner herself rolling up her sleeves to make a range of treats, such as preserved sweets in jars (ambrosia, pumpkin, banana, guava, milk sweets, among others), as well as cookies, broas, breads, cheeses and other dairy products.

In addition to cultural activities for children and other visitors, Acampamento Tibiriçá offers leisure activities such as zip lining, tree-top ropes courses, horseback riding, and various recreational activities that ensure educational entertainment for newcomers. Another key point seen on the property, which further reinforces the rural and educational tourism angle, is the partnership between the camp's owners and SENAR (National Rural Learning Service), which uses the space provided by the owners to teach courses to family farmers, such as “Pró-Leite,” where concepts of pasture rotation, productivity on small areas, dairy experience and countless subjects useful to small producers are taught.