The Camino a Gabriela Mistral heritage route is a new paradigm for creative and orange tourism!
The Creative Tourism Network®, had the honor of collaborating with the project “Innovation in the commercialization of the Camino a Gabriela Mistral route”, promoted by the Regional Government of Coquimbo through the Innovation Fund for Regional Competitiveness (FIC-R), and managed by a team from the Andrés Bello University.
The purpose of this collaboration has been to propose creative tourism –also known as “orange tourism” – as an innovative model, capable of converting the valuable cultural and patrimonial legacy of the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, into attractive quality creative experiences, both for a public of proximity, as for distant travelers.
The poet and teacher Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945 – the first awarded to an Ibero-American writer – was born and intellectually trained in the Coquimbo region. Since 2007, the Regional Government of Coquimbo has made a series of investments with the aim of rescuing, restoring, enhancing, and disseminating the tangible and intangible heritage linked to the literature, in particular rescuing properties where Gabriela Mistral lived relevant experiences.
All of this resulted in the formation of a heritage route –that links the sites related to her life and work– and in new public investment efforts to position the route as a heritage and cultural tourist attraction. In this framework, in 2019 Andrés Bello University applied for an FIC-R project to promote the development of the route’s tourist vocation, receiving the approval of the Regional Council.
This project, called Innovation in the commercialization of the Camino a Gabriela Mistral route, was structured around the following objectives:
– Develop proposals to improve these tourist experiences, as well as a collaborative work model between the various actors directly and indirectly linked to the route.
– Develop a positioning strategy for the destination, around the Way to Gabriela Mistral.
– Contribute to the proper use of the public investment made on tangible heritage to enhance the literary and educational work of Gabriela Mistral.
In this sense, the CreativeTourismNetwork®, in conjunction with the Route Technical Committee, created within the framework of the project, and with the Andrés Bello University work team, jointly identified the potential of the cultural, creative, and tourism sectors to devise possible synergies, through the co-creation of creative tourism experiences.
These works gave rise to the organization of three distance training sessions, given by the director of the Creative Tourism Network®, Caroline Couret, in which public and private representatives of each sector were able to learn more about the concept of creative tourism and the opportunities it offers to the problem of the route. Specifically, the participants were able to propose experiences, responding to the different profiles of creative tourists – Buyer Persona.
These sessions represented a first step towards the co-creation of creative tourism experiences related to Gabriela Mistral’s legacy and the destination’s DNA, as well as the structuring of an inclusive management model at the destination level. These results suggest a joint interest to develop innovative and differentiating tourism proposals, which allow, at the same time, to generate a value chain for the territory.
The CreativeTourismNetwork® congratulated all the members of this project, for their achievements.
