Lombardy Parks to Launch Visitor Center Boosting Eco-Tourism and Education
The reserves, nature, and ecology can, as is now well known, constitute a system to promote the economy, especially in areas where industry cannot reach. A convention with the Regione Lombardia aims to formalize the direct management of the emerging “Visitor Center of the regional State Forest Gardesana Occidentale and the Alto Garda Bresciano Park.” This is what the new board of the Mountain Community, installed at the end of 1999, proposes to formalize in reasonably short times. The President of the supra-municipal Authority, Avv. Bruno Faustini, announces this, convinced that the management of the future visitor center, located in Prabione di Tignale near the regional forestry nursery, could give a significant boost to eco-tourism in the protected area.
Objectives and features of the visitor center
“The bet is big,” says Faustini, “but we believe that the direct management of the Center, coordinated between the Mountain Community and the Regional Forest Company, is crucial for the future of the Alto Garda Park.” The structure is currently under construction. The construction site has recently resumed work on the final phase of the project.
“We hope,” says Faustini, “to see the visitor center completed by the end of 2000 or early 2001.” The purposes of the Visitor Center will be information, promotion, and education. It will be divided into various sectors: auditorium, library and videotape collection, bookshop, information desk, and a series of permanent exhibition halls dedicated to the most important social, cultural, historical, environmental, and naturalistic aspects of the Park and the State Forest.”
Role and impact of the center
A true “house of the park,” therefore, which can play a leading role in promoting and enhancing the entire territory of northwestern Garda, by channeling tourist flows from beaches to mountains, thus strengthening the process of socioeconomic balancing between the Garda coastal strip and its hinterland, an area that still today exhibits a typically mountain economy. Over the past decades, this area has experienced a significant exodus and a profound occupational and social crisis.
The Visitor Center is thus seen as a great opportunity for Alto Garda, an area that has yet to fully showcase its reasons of interest and appeal for those who haven’t had the chance to see the lake from the surrounding mountains, to discover it from unusual perspectives, or for those who haven’t connected with its rural dimension and especially its vast forest heritage.
For these reasons, the potential user base of the emerging center is notably broad: casual tourists, motivated visitors, students, teachers, graduates, scholars, researchers, and the local community. The Center, according to its creators, must serve a dual purpose: on one side, to provide elements for understanding the visited territory, landscape interpretation keys, insights for in-depth exploration, and prompts for comparison with similar situations; on the other side, to reflect that landscape, offering the essential tools to navigate through thematic paths and different levels of interest.