This dissertation highlights the promotion of tourism in the Parnaíba River Delta, and more specifically in Ilha Grande de Santa Isabel, Piauí state, Brazil. The research explores the transformations experienced by the island community related to the emergence of old and new tourism practices (federal tourism promotion, real estate/investment and new tourism), as an expression of innovative types of mobility. Tourism has become one of the most booming legal industries past 50 years, and as a social and transnational phenomenon continues to expand and diversify thanks to globalization processes. Since the mid 2000s the Parnaíba River Delta is object of a vigorous neoliberal tourism promotion and provides complex negotiations in which are involved the Federal Government public policy, private sector capital investments in tourism/real estate, islanders themselves and international development agencies. Tourism promotion registered in Ilha Grande de Santa Isabel shows macroeconomic processes glimpse investments of tourism/real estate capital of Balearic origin operating in Latin America and the Caribbean. Therefore, the ethnography draws attention to how a new “product” breaks in the Parnaíba River Delta that transforms, integrates and, in some cases displaces activities such as agriculture, artisanal fisheries, livestock and plant extraction, creating new symbolic forms of appropriation of natural resources and spaces. With the economic conversion of productive activities, natural resources (vegetal and animal) resources have gone from being a social and productive role, to acquire a speculative function and other aesthetic values. Foreign investment and the wide availability of international speculative capital have raised these restructuring processes. The logics and dynamics of island land purchase and residential proposals for tourism/real estate projects have triggered disputes and negotiations with both environmental agencies and with the local community. After a proper conceptualization of the islands socioeconomic context, the doctoral research analyzes the emergence of tourism initiatives undertaken at various levels and problematizes the multiple relationships within the population of the Ilha Grande de Santa Isabel with the environment in the context of tourism promotion. Given these new initiatives is registered ownership of environmental discourse as a form of resistance. Through the daily activities of fishermen, social meanings are examined, this being the political implications of the negotiation and implementation of new forms of tourism in Parnaíba River Delta. The doctoral research is based on an analysis of a large tourism mobilities paradigm allowing us to study the inherent dynamics of the phenomenon in the scenario of the Ilha Grande de Santa Isabel and specifically the relationship between controversial notions of tourism, development, and ecology.