Territorio Mudéjar and Fuentes de Ebro launch a plan for the integration of emerging professionals to develop a strategic plan of action for tourism and heritage.

Territorio Mudéjar and the Town Council of Fuentes de Ebro have signed the first special agreement between the entity and a partner town council to develop a strategic plan of sustainable tourism and heritage action through the insertion of emerging professionals and the development of a calendar of activities in that town.

The activities will consist of a recreational activity and a visit to Fuentes de Ebro guided by heritage professionals in which the Mudejar culture and its relationship with the town will be explored in depth. There will also be a dynamic of citizen participation to listen to the contributions that the neighbours want to make to the design of the strategic plan.

The agreement will last for six months. To develop it, the association Territorio Mudéjar has set up a work team made up of two young professionals who have been trained in the organisation thanks to the Desafío-Arraigo internship programme, better known as rural Erasmus, a pioneering project in Spain that the Diputación de Zaragoza and the University of Zaragoza launched in 2018 to enable university students to do internships in companies, institutions and associations in rural areas of Zaragoza. Territorio Mudéjar is collaborating with this project in 2019 and has made it possible to create a pool of emerging professionals with the necessary skills for the needs specified by the Fuentes de Ebro Town Council.

The team will be supervised by the project management area of the Territorio Mudéjar entity, which will define the strategic lines and integrate the locality’s own actions with the different innovation projects that Territorio Mudéjar has been developing since 2019 in its research stays and projects.

The mayoress of Fuentes de Ebro, María Pilar Palacín, explained that this agreement advances the local tourism strategy of the town, which seeks to make cultural resources, nature tourism and events visible to different target audiences. Among the heritage resources, she recalled that Fuentes de Ebro has the Gothic-Renaissance and Mudejar church of San Miguel, the Moorish and Jewish quarter in the town centre, vestiges of the civil war (trenches, machine gun nests) and the village of Rodén Viejo, declared a site of cultural interest; interesting post-war architecture and rationalist architecture (library), among others, to which are added the resources of landscape, gastronomy and nature.

The director of Territorio Mudéjar, Victoria Trasobares, added that this project is an interesting pilot model of collaboration with the partners that allows for progress in a line of work such as an “observatory” or “advisory committee” that the town councils can use to provide a strategic vision for their work in the management of local resources. Moreover, Trasobares added that “in the case of Fuentes de Ebro, the potential of the town and the great work done so far is evident, but also the intention to work with a vision of the future that would provide a link between the results of other previous projects such as: photography for different uses, the use of educational materials for families, the design of tourist awareness days or the impact of research actions on local development”.

This agreement will be a pilot test that could be extended to the rest of the partner municipalities that wish to incorporate emerging trained professionals who can be linked to the localities in the medium or long term, and introduce a way of working based on the quality and sustainability of the resources of the locality from a strategic and unitary supervision.

Calendar of activities:

The project began in January with various sectorial meetings and will continue with public activities from March with a calendar of conference-visits. The activities will have a fixed part (historical-artistic visit to the heritage of Fuentes -church and town planning- and to the historical complex of Rodén) and another thematic part that will change on each date with specialists or local experts:

  • Sunday 19 March: architecture and urban planning. Explanation of the urban development of Fuentes de Ebro and Rodén with specialists in the field linked to the town.
  • Sunday 16 April: Holy Week. Explanation of Easter Week linked to Fuentes de Ebro.
  • Sunday 7 May: Landscape and materials. Explanation of the extraction, work and use of the materials found in the area around Fuentes de Ebro, which are traditionally used for construction. Special emphasis will be placed on clay and alabaster. In addition, from the privileged enclave of Rodén, issues such as the explanation of the water resources and their importance in the configuration of the agricultural landscape that forms one of the signs of identity of Fuentes de Ebro and Rodén will be addressed.
  • Sunday 21 May: gastronomy and trade. Emphasis will be placed on local businesses and gastronomic traditions linked to the town of Fuentes de Ebro with various options such as micro-stops in invited businesses along the route and presentation of local products.
  • Sunday 11 June: activities for families. The visit will incorporate a didactic vision of the history of Fuentes de Ebro and Rodén through the different materials developed in the ‘Mudejar Pedagogy’ and ‘Mudejar Territory Circular’ projects.

Territorio Mudéjar currently has 40 member town councils in the province of Zaragoza and works to preserve and disseminate the Mudejar heritage as a driving force for local development.