News Americas, GEORGETOWN, Guyana, Fri. July 4, 2025: Nearly five decades after the world was stunned by the mass murder-suicide of more than 900 Peoples Temple members, Jonestown, Guyana – the remote jungle settlement at the center of the tragedy – has officially opened as a tourist attraction, according to a New York Times report.
A new $750 guided tour, operated by Guyanese company Wanderlust Adventures GY, gives visitors the chance to explore the site where Jim Jones, the leader of the Peoples Temple, orchestrated one of history’s most devastating cult tragedies on November 18, 1978.
The tour includes a flight from Georgetown, a rugged van ride, and a guided visit to the clearing where Jonestown once stood. Aside from dense vegetation and a single memorial plaque, little remains of the settlement that Jones once promised would be a utopian community free from racism and poverty.
The Times reports that the site’s opening has reignited painful debate both in Guyana and among survivors in the U.S. Some view the tour as a crude exploitation of suffering, while others defend it as a necessary effort to educate the public about the dangers of manipulation, authoritarian control, and cult ideology.
John Cobb, a Peoples Temple survivor who lost 11 family members in Jonestown, condemned the tour as “a money grab to capitalize on a tragedy.”
But tour organizer Roselyn Sewcharran, a Guyanese native with a background in sociology, told the Times the intent is not sensationalism but reflection. “There genuinely was a desire to learn more about this significant chapter of our past,” she said.
Guyanese officials and residents are divided. While some hope to shed the lingering association with Jonestown, others say confronting the past is unavoidable.
“It’s part of us, whether we like it or not,” Dee George, president of Guyana’s tourism association, told the Times.
The Jonestown site is now the latest addition to the global trend of “dark tourism” – travel to places connected to historical tragedy. But with few physical remnants remaining beyond the overgrowth, the legacy of Jonestown remains etched more in memory and controversy than in stone.
