Kaliurang is one of the oldest tourist places in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Located on the slopes of the Merapi Mountain, one of the most active volcanoes in Java Island for the past decades, it had transformed into one of the busiest touristic areas in Yogyakarta that many of its communities depended on to support their livelihood. Making a living just from the tourism sector does not mean having zero risk. In the past, only the eruption of Merapi occasionally stopped the touristic activities in Kaliurang. Until the beginning of 2020, when Kaliurang and the rest of the world face the outbreak caused by coronavirus or COVID-19 (Gossling, Scott and Hall, 2020; Semedi, 2020). This outbreak is the most challenging crisis that has strongly hit the tourism industry in Kaliurang since the Merapi eruption in 2010.

Built in the context of the COVID-19 epidemic, this paper is developed to understand how the COVID-19 hit local people engaged in tourism activity in Kaliurang? And how do they deal with this crisis? As Ingold (2000) argued that nature and humans are strongly connected. Every act of humans will impact the environment, and so does shifting conditions in the environments that will affect the human world’s stability.

Using an ethnographic approach, we attempt to understand the condition of tourism actors in Kaliurang during COVID-19 and explore the strategy and form of social security that helps the tourism actors survive.

From the research, we concluded that the touristic activities in Kaliurang had stopped not only by COVID-19 but also by the situation caused by Merapi Eruption. The social security shown in the tourism in Kaliurang is not coming from the government as the centre of power and resources. Still, it comes from the social solidarity that appears as the response to the gap of government role. The Pandemic crisis has returned the importance of Javanese moral values of sharing and caring through the idea of harmony and rukun.

Keywords: Covid-19, tourism, social security, pandemic, eruption, crisis