Transforming water overflow into sustainable tourism: Community resilience in Ayutthaya’s Sena trough

Existing studies on tourism in flood-prone areas primarily focus on risk, disaster response, and vulnerability, with limited attention to how long-term environmental adaptation is integrated into tourism practices. This study addresses this gap by examining how communities in the Sena trough of Ayutthaya reinterpret seasonal water overflow as a foundation for community-based tourism and local resilience. The Sena trough, a low-lying floodplain within the Chao Phraya River basin, experiences predictable annual inundation that shapes settlement patterns, agriculture, and everyday life. Rather than treating these seasonal water conditions as disasters, local communities frame them as “water overflow,” a cyclical environmental condition embedded in local ecological and cultural systems. Using a qualitative case study approach, the research draws on field observations conducted between 2020 and 2024, supported by spatial analysis of flood-prone areas and validation discussions with local actors. The findings show how adaptive practices such as stilt housing, flood-adapted agriculture, canal-based mobility, and seasonal aquaculture have been translated into tourism experiences including boat tours, homestays, and participatory agricultural activities. These findings demonstrate how environmental adaptation, community resilience, and community-based tourism function as an integrated process, in which everyday adaptive practices are translated into experiential and economic activities. The study contributes to tourism geography by showing how long-term environmental adaptation can be operationalized as tourism, extending conventional perspectives that treat resilience as reactive rather than process-based.