“Geoparks are the fastest growing kind of parks in the world,” announced Ross Dowling, coordinator of the third Global Conference on Geotourism, held in Muscat, Oman last week. Naturally, the Guadalajara Reporter was there to cover the event, thanks to the generous sponsorship of Jalisco’s Casa San Matías, distiller of Pueblo Viejo tequila.
To my surprise, I found I was representing, at this event, not only Jalisco and Mexico, but all the other countries of Latin America as well, not to mention the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. This is probably due to the fact that Geotourism is something new in the field of tourism, as one might guess from the fact that there is only one Geopark in all of North America.
So, let’s take a look at what Geoparks and Geotourism are all about. As Dowling explains it, tourism brings people into contact with three marvelous worlds, which he sums up as A, B and C: Abiotic, Biotic and Cultural. While B and C are usually well attended to, the Abiotic world of rocks, magma, tectonic plates and the great forces that formed our planet is often understood only by geologists, but Dowling and other promoters of Geotourism are out to change all that and to give the rest of us a peek into the fascinating universe that literally lies beneath our feet. As for Geoparks, they are sites featuring geology which is rare or scientifically, aesthetically or educationally interesting and they have been promoted by UNESCO since 1999. It’s interesting to note that the very first International Geoparks Conference took place in Beijing, China in 2004. Today there are 87 officially recognized members of the Global Geopark Network (GGN) in 27 countries, with most of these parks in China, followed by Italy and Great Britain. Acceptance by the GGN would give a park considerable prestige and I should think would bring it visitors from all around the globe.
I gave a talk at this conference on what I call The Magic Circle around Guadalajara, an area 500 kilometers wide encompassing portions of all five of Mexico’s ecosystems and so much biodiversity and geodiversity that you couldn’t possibly see all of its wonderful natural sites in a single lifetime. Curiously, the world still hasn’t discovered the Guadalajara area as a mecca for nature lovers, although geologists tell me that their colleagues come to western Mexico from all over the world just to look at sites like Colima’s very active Fire Volcano, the Giant Pumice Horizon (which I described in this column last week), or Paricutín, in Michoacán, where a volcano popped up in a cornfield in 1943, grew and then erupted, offering scientists a rare opportunity to study various phenomena related to volcanoes.
While numerous presenters in Muscat showed beautiful slides of marvelous natural features, for me the clearest example of what Geotourism really is, was our experience during a field trip to a remote spot in Oman called Wadi Mayh. This excursion took place in typical Omani fashion: extravagantly. Four-wheel-drive vehicles were required for the rough terrain we would visit, so the local sponsor of the conference, His Majesty Sultan Qaboos himself, supplied 4WD vehicles: nearly 30 of them, in fact, and, of course all of them brand-new, all of them Toyota Land Cruisers and all of them white.
I have never been in quite such a procession before and I am amazed how smoothly the caravan threaded its way through narrow mountain passes, wide expanses of loose gravel and down the kind of steep dirt roads that leave your heart at the bottom of your stomach.
Now, all this effort was aimed at bringing us face to face with high cliff walls which a layman might hardly glance at while driving by. Through megaphones, however, our guides pointed out how the tectonic plates on or near which Oman sits, long ago exerted tremendous pressure on the rock, pushing it upwards, folding it over on itself and bringing a rare kind of rock called ophiolite right up to the surface. Ophiolite is actually part of the Earth’s upper mantle and oceanic crust and Oman is widely considered to have some of the best exposed ophiolite in the world. “We can see all this geology so easily here in Oman,” explained our guides, “because the rock is completely exposed, with scarcely any dirt or plant cover.”
To make the tour educational, the Omanis had prepared maps indicating the geological attractions in the wadi and demonstrated how a lone hiker or mountain biker could enjoy a self-guided tour using a GPS-equipped iPad or other device to inform him or her all about the local geology – a sort of robotic cicerone, which I personally consider absurd due to the fact that the screens on these devices are just about impossible to see in bright sunlight, with which both Oman and Mexico have been abundantly blessed.
What I learned on this field trip was that the presentation of geological features can be made interesting to ordinary people, but only up to a certain point. Many attendees agreed that this kind of tour might be given a thumbs-up by people who are on their way to or from some other truly remarkable tourist attraction which might not necessarily be related to geology at all, but if visitors are offered nothing but geology, they would probably come away bored (sorry about that, geologist friends!).
This brought to mind the practical case of western Mexico, which, at the moment, attracts tourists to sites like Lake Chapala, Tequila and Tlaquepaque. There is, however, an abundance of unusual geological features in the area and visits to some of them could add new dimensions to a tourist’s visit to Jalisco.
For example, the World Heritage Site comprising the agave fields and archaeological ruins of Teuchitlán contain so many interesting geological features that the same area might easily qualify as a Geopark. Just a few of these features are: Río Caliente, Tequila Volcano, the Great Stone Balls (Piedras Bola), the opal mines of Magdalena, the Giant Pumice Horizon of the Primavera Forest, the Fossil Fumaroles of Tala and Jalisco’s vast obsidian deposits which are the third largest in the world. If this area – which I suggest could be named “The Volcanic Geopark of Western Mexico” – were accepted as a member of UNESCO’s Global Geopark Network, it would become the second Geopark in North America and, of course, the first in Mexico and would soon attract a new type of tourist to this area, a tourist who might start out hiking through the geologically rich deep canyons of the Primavera Forest and might later enjoy the murals of Orozco, a visit to San Juan de Diós Market and the charm of spending the night in a genuine hacienda.
Would a volcanic Geopark bring new revenue to Jalisco? Well, Chinese Geoparks report a 200% income increase since opening and their latest Geopark in Hong Kong (These parks don’t necessarily have to be out in the boonies if the geology is right) has already had 1.5 million visitors since it opened and Ewan McCarthy of Bright 3D in Scotland reported at the Geotourism conference that nature-based tourism in his country has produced 17 billion pounds in revenue and created jobs for 240,000 people .
Jalisco’s Secretariat of Tourism has expressed interest in investigating the Geotourism concept, according to Victor Mijangos, Director of Tourism Planning, and will hold a press conference on the subject in the near future. In a way, this is one small gain for the Global Conference on Geotourism, which according to Ross Dowling, attracted over 400 people from 26 countries. “Compared to the previous conferences, this was a lot bigger,” he commented. “Here in Oman there was much more government involvement and a large number of students attended, which was great. Oman didn’t know a lot about Geotourism before, but now that they have been exposed to it, I think they will get deeply involved. So the conference was very successful, with a lot of really good outcomes.”
Including, I might add, possible good outcomes in Mexico, 15,000 kilometers away. (See www.ranchopint.com for more stories and photos on the Geotourism Conference.) By the way, the next Geotourism Conference will be held in Iceland in 2013 and the following might be in Ecuador in 2015, giving Mexico just enough time to set up North America’s second Geopark.