Every place in Bali that turns into a tourist magnet started out as something specific. Canggu had surf, empty beaches and rice fields. Ubud had art, ceremonies and a feeling of calm. Uluwatu had cliffs and some of the best waves in the world. Kuta, long before the bars and the traffic, had a wide beach and a village behind it. Then, one by one, these places start to lose the thing people came for. The locals have a word for the people who arrive in growing numbers: “bule” (pronounced boo-leh), the everyday Indonesian term for foreigners, usually Western ones. I have been wondering why the arrival of the bule so often goes together with the loss of what they came to see.

Why people come

Bali offers a combination that is hard to find anywhere else. Culture is part of daily life here, with offerings on the pavement every morning, ceremonies, dance and craft. Within an hour you can go from beach to jungle to rice terraces to a volcano. The weather is warm, the pace is slow, and the people are friendly. On top of that, Bali is cheap if you earn in euros, dollars or Australian dollars. You can live a life here that you could not afford at home.

That last part matters more than it seems. The low price is a big part of the appeal, and it is also behind much of the damage.

Concrete where the fields used to be

The most visible damage is physical. Walk around Canggu today and you will see giant concrete houses and walled villa compounds going up on land that was recently paddy field. A plot that held green rice and a footpath now holds a multi-storey block, a high wall and a plunge pool. Each building looks like a small thing. Add them up and the village is gone: the open views, the sound of water running through the irrigation channels, the sense of a small community with surf down the road.

It goes beyond looks. Rice fields share one irrigation system, so when a few plots are filled in and the channels get cut, the farmers next door lose their water. Paved ground sends rain straight into drains that were never built for it, and the flooding gets worse every year. Lanes made for scooters and farm carts fill up with construction trucks, and later with the cars of the people who moved into the new buildings.

So Canggu ends up selling a picture of village life and rice fields while building over them. A visitor arriving now finds walls, cafes and building sites, with a few remaining fields kept as scenery. The charm that drew the first wave is the first thing the second wave removes, and the people who came for it leave.

A fragile kind of appeal

What people come for in Bali cannot be produced at scale. A quiet lane with rice fields at the end is attractive because it is quiet and has rice fields. Fill it with villas, scooters and beach clubs and the product is gone, even though the name on the map has not changed.

Every extra visitor and every extra building makes the place a little less like the thing being sold. The early arrivals get the real version. The later ones get a copy, and the copy draws a different crowd.

Which bule give the least back

I have asked myself whether Canggu attracts the wrong kind of bule. I do not like that phrase, because it points at nationality or wealth, and neither tells you much. A better question is how much of a visitor’s money ends up with Balinese families. Some segments of bule, both visitors and residents, give very little back compared with the pressure they put on the place.

Many long-stay bule rent a villa, work remotely for clients abroad and spend most of their money at foreign-run cafes, co-working spaces and clubs. They use the roads, the water, the waste collection and the beaches. Their contribution to Balinese incomes and local tax is small.

A growing share of the villas, restaurants, beach clubs and tour companies is also owned or controlled by foreigners, often through nominee arrangements that get around the ownership rules. The profit leaves the island, so a high visitor count can sit alongside modest benefits for the people next door. Some bule also work illegally on tourist visas, running unregistered businesses in photography, guiding, transport or teaching and undercutting Balinese workers. Authorities have noticed and have stepped up enforcement and deportations.

Then there is the effect on prices. Strong-currency incomes push up rents, land leases and food prices until local people cannot keep up. The money is real, but it mostly reaches landowners and developers, while everyone else pays more. It is also this demand that pays for the villas eating the rice fields. Add the small insults, such as scooters without helmets or licences, bare shoulders at temples, climbing sacred trees for a photo, and goodwill wears thin as well.

Spending more does not automatically put someone on the right side of this. A wealthy renter in a luxury villa owned by a foreign investor can give back less than a backpacker who eats at a family warung, hires a local driver and sleeps in a homestay. When I visited Ubud, the money in the air was obvious, and the place felt calmer and more polished than Canggu. That tells me about behavior and atmosphere. It does not tell me where the money ends up.

Why Bali does this to itself

It is too easy to blame the bule alone. They respond to what is on offer, and Bali’s landowners, developers, investors and local governments have strong financial reasons to offer more.

Land is at the center of it. A rice field earns a modest living from farming, but a villa developer will lease or buy it for many times that. For one family the choice makes sense, and saying no can look foolish when the neighbors are getting rich. Thousands of sensible decisions add up to the loss of the landscape that visitors came to see. Roads, drains, waste collection and water supply, built for a village, are then asked to serve a resort district.

Rules exist but are applied unevenly. Permits get bypassed, zoning is bent, and the limits on foreign ownership are worked around with leaseholds and nominees. So each place is allowed to grow until the qualities that made it popular have worn thin.

The pattern

A quiet place is found by a small group of people who value it. Money follows, and builders construct for the bigger crowd arriving behind them. Concrete replaces fields. The share of bule who give little back grows, the village character fades, and the first admirers drift away to the next quiet spot. What remains is a busier, louder and less distinctive version of the original. Kuta went through this. Canggu is in the middle of it. Parts of Ubud and Uluwatu are showing the first signs.

What I would love to see, to change it

Places that avoid this tend to limit building density and height, protect farmland, demand infrastructure before approving new construction, and keep ownership and income in local hands. Bali has introduced a tourist levy, some building restrictions and tougher action against foreigners who break the rules. These are good steps. Whether they can hold up against the pull of the land market, I do not know.

Plenty of bule would value what Bali offers and treat it with care. The trouble is that the system pays best for turning rice fields into villas and charm into volume, and most of that volume does little for the people who live there. Until that changes, the next fashionable village will go the way of the last one.