The INCUNA “Máximo Fuertes Acevedo” (Industry, Culture and Nature) Association has just started XacoGeo, an ambitious project supported by the Spanish authorities to promote Cultural Tourism. This interesting idea gathers 250 heritage resources useful for everyone walking through the Way of Saint James that will increase when quality stamps are developed for concerned items (those about tourism, gastronomy, people… that run according to INCUNA’s criteria).
XacoGeo includes an application for smart phones and some resources in Internet that connect the walker with any relevant facts or interesting sites available within a maximum of one day walking from the Route of Compostela, in its northern path, such as local food, industrial heritage, nature, geology, cultural resources and any other elements of interest for them.
INCUNA gathers different experts that worked together to make a simple ‘app’ for phones and a database with complex items. Duonet Company wrote the ‘app’ and Archistec Llume prepared the database, both working close together with the highest level researchers and specialized people.
XacoGeo will be in phones and web pages via a specific logo that combines the well known scallop shell with industrial iconography. This picture will be available in many pages to allow downloading the application (all along the northern path of the Route of Santiago), in The Basque Country, Cantabria, Asturias, Galicia and Leon. The authorities of these five Spanish regions are pushing the UN to protect the northern way of the Way of Saint James as it did, some years ago, with the southern one (called ‘the French Way’).
The Spanish government would like the northern path of the Route of Santiago –the one closer from the coast (and the original way)– to be declared as World Heritage by the UN. This is a project in which all the involved regions are working together, under the technical leadership of the Principality of Asturias.
Ultimately, XacoGeo is a digital tool for the web and smart phones, that supports the creation of social and commercial nets to transmit the walkers information about how important it is to preserve the resources around the Route of Compostela, one historical way that many people see as the ancestor of the united Europe still in construction, from the Medieval Ages to our era.
To be more reliable, XacoGeo includes ‘geocaching’ references and works over Apple and Android platforms (both, in phones and tablets-PC), as well as via the web.
Nevertheless, the ‘app’ is not the most important item of the project, which grows over the relevance of a database built by five Spanish regions working together to find a new perspective for an old reference in the European culture that has attracted the interest of hundreds of thousands of people for over ten centuries.
Interested people can join the project or enquire about it in incuna@telecable.es
XacoGeo, an ambitious project of INCUNA supported by the Spanish authorities to promote Cultural Tourism