By María M. Mur |
Huilo Huilo Biological Reserve (Chile) (EFE).- The Huilo Huilo Biological Reserve, in southern Chile, used to be a native forest besieged by the logging industry. Today, two decades later and after a 180 degree turn, it is one of the greatest exponents of sustainable tourism in the region and a sacred refuge for the emblematic huemul people.
Juanita Quintoman, 46, weaves black and red “trariwes” (typical sash of the Mapuche woman) for small cloth dolls, to which she will later put “chaway” (hoop earrings) that she has made with sheet metal. Of cans.
The daughter and wife of former logging workers, Quintoman is one of nearly 50 artisans who work for the shops of a uniquely architectural hotel complex on the reservation.
“It has been very difficult for people to believe that they can make a living from tourism because there are seasons that go down, others that go up, but the forestry task is very hard. Tourism in the long run is good, ”the artisan acknowledged to EFE in her workshop in Neltume, a town 800 kilometers south of Santiago.
Ana María Zambrano, who worked for years in a dining room for a forestry company and now runs her own restaurant and a small lodging, believes the same: “The community has gone from cutting down trees to worshiping them,” she told EFE.
“Inhabiting the forest” in a sustainable way
With an extension of 100,000 hectares, Huilo Huilo is a private reserve that was established two decades ago when the forestry industry of the native forest -mainly coigüe, rauli, ulmo- was in decline and its owners decided to bet on another, more sustainable area.
“At the end of the last century there is a great crisis and a lot of unemployment and, as a family, we began to think about what we could do with this incredible place. Lake Pirihueico is one of the few that is truly virgin on its two shores,” the executive director of the reserve, Alexandra Petermann, told EFE.
Instead of betting on mass tourism, it was decided to build a hotel complex with a “special mystique” and in the purest “Lord of the Rings” style, linked together by a system of walkways that evoke the roots of a tree.
For Petermann, the objective is for tourists to “inhabit the forest”, “fall in love with nature” and “become aware of the importance of its conservation”.
The transition to tourist activity has not been easy – the little timber industry that remains is for self-consumption – and “it had to be shown that the standing tree is worth more in economic terms than the tree on the ground,” Rodolfo Cortez explained to EFE. , director of the Huilo Huilo Foundation.
The key for Huilo Huilo to have gone from having 5,000 tourists a year to more than 100,000 was to involve the communities from the beginning, he pointed out.
The model, according to Cortez, could be “replicated” in the neighboring region of La Araucanía, where there has been a bitter conflict for decades between the State, large foresters and the Mapuche people, the largest in Chile.
the southernmost deer
One of the foundation’s flagship projects is the Southern Huemul Conservation Center, a pioneering project where it has been possible to reproduce these mammals in controlled environments and reintroduce them into the Chilean Patagonian jungle, where 70% of the 1,500 remaining specimens live. in the world.
The huemul, emblem of the Andes and part of the Chilean shield, is the southernmost deer in the world and was declared endangered in 1973 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
The forestry industry, pumas and illegal hunting caused Huilo Huilo to run out of huemules in the 1980s and it was not until 2016 when the first two specimens were reintroduced.
“There were several failed projects because there was a lot of ignorance and conventional herd management techniques were applied, locking them in corrals, without taking their sensitivity into account,” Eduardo Arias, director of the Foundation’s Wildlife Department, told EFE.
Currently, the center has 30 huemules in semi-captivity and the plan is to release three or four specimens this year to join the six that already live in the wild.
In addition to the huemul, the foundation also has projects for sustainable agriculture, the reinsertion of endemic flora, and the conservation of Darwin’s frog, another endangered species.
“Conservation – Cortez closed – is not incompatible with economic development, you just have to find a balance.”
