The eternal heat

Does the geoturism work in Piura?

 

By Nelson Peñaherrera Castillo

 

    The Tambogrande educational Project (Peru, 2010) integrated many of our suggestions but the most highlighted are the formation of local identity, the healthy lifestyles, and the geotourism. The first ones seem to justify without problems on the document because they are part of the classic purposes of the school, but how does an activity contribute to improve the educational level of a community?

 

Essentially, we can define the geotourism as the possibility to put our environmental, political, economic, and social-cultural reality into an attractive pack of services for the persons who visit us, and profitable –sustainable too—for ourselves.

 

The requirement for this activity to work is the transparency which all this set of realities is shown, and the care we have in an integral way, so it turns in a sustainable high-profile eco-sustainable business – while more original and attractive, the better for who operating it.

 

Who boost this initiative in particular suggest the generation of itself breaks out from the own community, and that it eventually promotes with the support of private companies and grassroot organizations. The private company could do it very well but the risk to run is the gains end to drown the originality and dynamism of the people because the geoturism is based much upon social-environmental processes instead of the purely economic ones.

 

As much as the people-&-environment binome to be understood, with all its added products, then this activity could be focused on its right perspective. It’s preferent to think of the identity marketing instead of the marketing identity.

 

    The role of the communities

In Piura’s reality, from our point of view, the implementation of geoturism strucks with a very big obstacle: the absence of local identities and a solid regional identity. It’s hard to find one only responsible of this reality, and rather we believe the problem must be assumed like a more systematic issue. So the solution might have a similar impact.

 

In that context, the first step to guarantee the geotourism’s sustainability in Piura Region is the formation of identity in every level. The idea would be the school to promote this flow, if not, some communitarian projecting organization with a pedagogical vocation. It’s not about the school to concentrate this role but it can extend to the rest of the educational community, that it’s the same like the community in general – the people, the authorities, the institutions, the unions, the corporations, etc.

 

The challenge is identifying the peculiar of every community, meditating about the chances to offer, and presenting it by thinking of an achievement that involves all those sectors. In the background, the school takes its classic role between the akademos (the ancient Greek school) and the yachaywasi (the ancient Inca school), with the impact that both institutions had in the identity formation of their regarding communities, what millennial or centuries later, we continue feeding from.

 

    The proposals for Piura

The big peculiarity for Piura is our identity is tied to the presence or absence of water. We own two Pacific basins, which one is binational and the another is Atlantic, where different biospaces are generated, composed by very different but complementary communities.

 

In fact, looking at Piura from wwest to east, we find the sea and the beach strip, the urban square surrounded by the three big coastal valleys, Sechura Desert, the Illescas reserved zone, the intermediate zone between Quiroz and Espíndola Rivers, Macará River, the Andean Plateau, Upper Piura, the water generator zones and Huancabamba Valley.

 

The urban and rural communities will have to analyze what the material & unmaterial resources variety they own, and how they can organize into a geotouristic offer. The grassroot organizations just can ease the process but as much as the community perceive itself as the process builder, the result will be more successful.

 

The best way that a pedagogical project gets educative results from the geoturism is by extracting advantage from information-for-action that is based upon the matrix we have called RSA (research, share, act). If the school can be the touchstone to propitiate this change, we can assure the sustainable development will be an ideal much simple to get, although it’s not the only way, obviously. Check out all the articles we have posted about tourism.

 

Edited by Ángel Ramos Guerrero.

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