The Challenge
Santa María de Fe, a small town in Misiones, Paraguay, was slowly fading from the map. Despite its rich Jesuit heritage and deep cultural roots, the town attracted almost no visitors, leaving its community with little economic opportunity and its story untold. Senatur needed a solution, but with no budget for traditional hotel infrastructure, building a conventional tourism product was simply not an option.
The Solution
So we took a different approach: instead of bringing a hotel to the town, we turned the town itself into the hotel. The creative challenge was profound. Convincing locals to open their doors to strangers required deep community trust-building. And launching a very unknown destination with low tourism pull meant the idea itself had to generate awareness barely from zero, making the concept not just creative, but necessary. Santa Maria Pueblo Hotel began as an idea, but the village adopted it with 12 businesses and 55 locals involved in the project, working together instead individually as they used to work before.
