Graciela Alcantara working with bird nets.

In this project, we are looking for building a Communitarian Ecotourism strategy together with the community of San Juan Teponaxtla, Oaxaca, Mexico as a valuable way to support the indigenous people in finding an economic alternative.

Environmental education activities with children.

We will be working with community in workshops to build the Ecotourism strategy hand by hand. At the same time, we are doing several biologic studies such as inventories of birds and mammals (and maybe we will be working with amphibians, reptiles and a special group of plants such as orchids) and also, we are trying to systemise traditional knowledge of the cuicatec community such as customs, relationship between people and nature, native language, medicinal plants, and other issues. All this information will be shared in the Ecotourism programme.

Another branch of our project is about of training of indigenous people in environmental education, ecotourism, and biologic topics. We will be organising a course about this topic for a special team of indigenous people training to be tour guides in Ecotourism. In this way, they will be able to manage the ecotourism programmes by themselves. Finally, another result of our project will be a set of identification guides about birds, mammals and special plants. This guide will be illustrated with photos or drawings and will include both scientific and traditional information, such as cuicatec language names of animals and plants.