Tourism and cultural heritage are two strong vectors of local development, which was explained at length during a session of the European Week of Cities and Regions 2018. The European Commission, a Greek regional authority and a social entrepreneur participated in this session to share their experiences and the solutions they try to implement each at their own scale.
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Aragon is an autonomous region located in northeastern Spain. It holds reservoirs and rivers of great interest for sports activities. Many of those reservoirs and rivers are in rural areas whose towns have suffered large depopulation processes, as their lands have been flooded to build reservoirs and activities such as agriculture, livestock farming or mining have been abandoned. Some local companies have decided to pursue a model of quality, experiential tourism based on sustainability criteria to reverse the depopulation. This is the case of companies that provide fishing, rafting or canyoning guides, among others.
The Pyrenees mountain range is in the North of Aragon. The Pyrenees Fly Fishing Company (www.pyreneesflyfishing.com) was started by two young men who chose Biescas as an ideal destination for a fly-fishing holiday on the sunny side of the Pyrenees and a good option to stay and live in the area.
The Pyrenees are considered a unique place worldwide for fly-fishing, since they host the oldest ecotype of Zebra Trout in the European continent, and offer sunny days, warm weather, stunning landscapes and rivers, and a unique gastronomy and culture, in addition to national and natural parks belonging to an impressive ecosystem.
For the Pyrenees Fly Fishing guides it is important to promote and encourage this type of touristic model, especially now, since 2017 is the International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development. This activity requires the services of one guide for every one or two fishermen, with the subsequent potential to generate employment. Moreover, being catch-and-release, this activity respects the fishing resources and adds value to the protection and conservation of elements of high ecological value such as rivers. As the guides say, “the rivers will not be conserved until the local economies perceive the benefits.”
Author:
Adrián Satué (Pyrenees Fly Fishing)
In the middle of Italy there is an ancient land full of mystery, a region of mountains and caves, with clear springs, with small running rivers which flow over limestone. Wildlife roams free, and nature feels wild and pure. The locals are descendants of an ancient people called the Samnites, a people of pastoral warrior origins, roaming nomadically with their stock.
There is an old legend that says that each samnite tribe in the area had a special animal they followed, a white bull, a kingfisher etc, when the animal would wander so would they.
We at the Heartland Association chose this area in order to create a special model of Eco-tourism, integrated into the local fabric of life, one that helps repopulate the abandoned lands of the mountains, a model that energises green issues, such as responsible tourism and organic farming, putting them into a cohesive framework, turning this area into what it is already called: The Green Heart of Italy.
We have been working in the campsite industry for 15 years, mainly in the UK, and we own and operate a company, Spirits Intent, which manufactures nomadic tents, like yurts and tipis. Over the years we have created, or helped to create over 300 yurt campsites.
But all through those years we looked to create a deeper meaning, back at 2009 we started looking to get campsites to build a central “palace” in the middle of their campsites, a place where they can create events, a place that brings their clients into the real magic of living in a nomadic village, into the feeling of a tribe, into the magic so to speak, to give their clients something more than only a back to nature experience, we wanted people to also return to the tribe, to come together on those campsites not just sit in their own glamorous tent alone.
So when we got to make our own site here in Abruzzo, we focused on creating the most spectacular tent venue. It’s called the zodiac tent, and adjoined 12 yurt complex with a massive central covered area; it’s a reproduction of a 12th century court tent of the mughul empire; it’s called the zodiac tent because it was made in the image of cosmos. The 12 yurts were the 12 zodiac signs, and the central tent that joined them was the celestial sphere, an image that represented the view of the cosmos in the 12th century, a tent that represented the whole world.
The idea is to take people into nature and let them feel their natural roots but also to wander across time into the tribal feeling of being together. It’s not just a holiday in nature, it’s an event centre with a heart, where people come together through life coaching events, allowing to bring real change into their life.
We have founded our site on an 11 hectare abandoned farm which is 1 km away from nearby neighbours in any direction, and it gives us the space to allow our visitors to totally detox from society, to remember another time, the land here offers a link with the past so that helps as well.
At the foot of the Majella massif we have found a land rich with nature, with small rivers, with free wildlife, a place that is rich with tradition and with a link to history that has never been disturbed. You can feel the Samnite tribes that lived in the land as if they only lived here 50 years ago; there is no cut in the strings of history. Tradition and culture run a continuous identity we never even imagined still exists anywhere in Europe. In the UK we are used to rural communities that have no more traditional identity because of the amount of buyers from the city; every house or farm has someone that came from somewhere else, the sense of rural identity has been lost.
But alongside all of the existing treasures we have found a land that has been de-populated heavily, neighbouring farmers that can hardly keep farming, local villages on the brink of being left abandoned, and whole areas in the country are left to be taken over by nature; places were families lived and farmed, even small churches are now overgrown and left to fall.
We decided we must help, we want to give something back for all the warmth they give us, to help this area make a stand, to come back and share its amazing history, its abundant nature.
So we decided to create a model for Eco-tourism using our 11 hectares of land, using our own yurt campsite, using our 15 years of experience. One that can be copied directly into other places across the region, to help use that new type of tourism, that is a little unknown in central Italy, as a platform for development, to open it to a new type of visitor, the slow and responsible type.
The Model is quite simple, we aim to use the fact that rural communes have been contracting inwards towards the villages, and this usually means there is a wealth of abandoned land up for development. The idea is simple: the lands at the edge of each local municipality get developed into a green park, at the heart of each of those green areas, there is a small tourist operator- a campsite or an organic farm with a b&b for example.
The old roads get developed slowly (using shared resources to minimise expenditure) into a sort of responsible tourism attraction, creating a network of walks in nature, into places where people can come and enjoy the outdoors, small handprinted signs sharing the history of the place, its wildlife,
Focusing on the one person at a time sort of tourism, rather than creating modern attractions that bring busloads of people. We believe the most important feature of this type of development is not to change the identity rural communities have, but to help them share their treasures of rural life and natural products in a sustainable way. Methods of giving houses away to investors if they renovate them, for example, or the whole sale of villages, we believe, is wrong because it encourages the loss of local identity.
Small investors can then come and take those abandoned areas, and develop them into a small attraction for visitors, the farmers around that area can support the activity by growing more and more organic produce that can be sold directly, and bit by bit the area gets developed into a natural haven. Finding people wanting to go back to nature isn’t hard. Yes, southern Europe is a little behind on that level, but there is a new trend full of people wanting to go back and create a small farm in nature, or start a little campsite, to farm naturally and live in an integrated relationship with the surroundings.
Basically we are implementing all we learned in the 15 years of campsite building into a very rural mountain area in Abruzzo, Italy, in order to help it develop using the small financial resources it has, but building on the wealth of nature and traditions it is famous for, because we believe this is the only way those areas can be brought back from becoming extinct: by using organic farming and eco-tourism hand in hand, creating a small network of attractions for visitors and small high quality restaurants that offer local product and traditional food, complementing organic farming with small touristic farm stays, an integrated network of back to nature, using the old traditions that have usually only just started disappearing.
In order to get this type of tourism to take hold, we are trying to get the region of Abruzzo to understand the concept of Eco-tourism, and see if it can develop some incentives to help small scale investors to develop those abandoned places. What we think is the best route of action is to create some planning by laws that maintain that eco tourism operators, organic farmers, or anyone who is willing to develop the countryside in that manner, is allowed to do so by building on farming land using low impact methods, like wood and mud buildings, straw bale, or even tents.
We are now looking if change of land use into a campsite, for example, is necessary, as this would create a lengthier and more complicated process for individuals, in a way it would be best if one were allowed to simply develop straight on agricultural land, because in most cases this is what one finds, so the local planning office needs to shed some light and be brought in on the scheme.
The idea is to use our own land and site, to use our experience in creating Eco-tourist campsites as a guinea pig. We intend to take a little more heat, in the hope that what we can establish here can later be copied elsewhere, saving others the time and hassle of going through the process.
We believe that because of the fact that rural communes in Italy usually lack the funds to fix the small roads and maintain them, a sort of deal can be struck where the small scale investor is asked to pay less tax to the commune from his business, in return to maintaining and developing those areas, with the understanding that because he or she developed the outreaches of the municipality it’s often hard to get all services to the site, and some kind of deal is struck so the investor can make a living, with consideration that in fact the municipality is asking the investor to develop some of its infrastructure in return.
The most important aspect for us is that we have created an actual pilot rather than another study. All too often all the available funds get lost on creating studies or on paying consultants, they make nice graphs and collect local projects that hope for funding, but in the end no local cooperation takes place, no network of local attractions is created and there is a lack of a central body to lead small scale innovation.
We believe those little green areas, those small time investors can become the hub of those networks in each municipality, it takes a certain type of individual or organisation to do that, but it’s often that sort of person that will go and live at the edge of society so to speak, a person that develops nature, that would focus on changing others too.
We have found others here too in Abruzzo, small scale organic projects. We were amazed to see that not only they worked their fields by hand, teach an endless string of volunteers. They have even got into the local administration in their municipality in order to change things in the village.
It’s that type of individuals that needs the help, that needs the funding, people who spend years dedicating themselves to save nature, saving seeds of ancient grains, learning traditions, talking to the locals, helping in their fields.
We are now looking to create a network across Southern Europe, one that is going to use Eco-tourism to change local communities, we are looking for small operators, people trying to find a place to build a small organic farm, to own a small campsite in nature, but also bigger cooperations and funding bodies. We aim to help the region change some by-laws and make planning for that sort of tourism applications easier, to create laws that allow one to build eco buildings and low impact structures for tourism on agricultural land, without the need for change of use, we hope to establish a sort of network, of similar projects, so as to have a power in mass, to create this as a platform for change.
It is an amazing experience to be able to help a whole region. We are now not only operating our own site (also called Heartland) but also working with the Heartland association to promote all green issues in Abruzzo. We are part-organisers of the Naturafest Abruzzo festival, which takes place this year on the 1-2 of October in the town of Lanciano. This festival is a sort of gathering of all the local organic and small scale tourist operators, a window for us to bring those issues to the public, and to come together as a whole.
If you are interested in co-operating, if you too are part of a rural community that needs to find sustainable progress, we are open to working with you, to help you implement the same methods to reach greener goals. You can view some of our work on http://spiritsintent.com/group-consciousness/
The website also has our contact details for anyone who wants to get in touch. The Heartland association has been created to focus on those issues, feel free to get in contact to become a member or if you need some help to establish a similar project because those are the aims of our Association, to help Southern Europe to make a rural stand.
Author: Nitsan Morag (Spirits Intent)