The São José Environmental Protection Area (EPA) in the State of Minas Gerais has a rich natural and historical patrimony. However, in spite of its value and of being a protection area since 1981, it has now suffering several degradations. In that sense, the major objective of this work is to value São José EPA with the purpose of supplying subsidies for the elaboration and attainment of public and private projects of preservation or sustainable exploration of the referred asset, as well as for public policy directed to its administration. As valuation method, it was used the contingent valuation through the approach of Hanemann (1984) and the bootstrapping method to obtain a monthly willingness-to-pay (WTP) per family of the municipal districts that compose São José EPA of R$22,88, with a relatively low standard-error, R$3,25. As for the reliability of the estimate measure, stands out the concern of the present work in trying to avoid or to minimize the bias that usually happen in researches of environmental valuation.
São José EPA; contingent valuation; environmental valuation; willingness-to-pay
