San Bernardo’s Culinary Circuit: Between Popular Flavors and Crafts

Abstract

The pressures of the new world and national tourism currents, created in the last two decades, have resulted in an increasing number of tourism projects in indigenous, rural and urban communities, through the impulse of external agents such as NGOs, private companies, public institutions and international cooperation. This article has as its main objective, to promote growing gastronomic tourism, as a dynamic activity that is being integrated in the commune of San Bernardo (Metropolitan Region, Chile). In addition, this work is pioneer and exploratory, contributing to local tourist activity through the study of tourism circuits through a collaborative work between public and private actors. This research is of an exploratory-descriptive type, through analysis of sequential sources of documents from public bodies (INE, Sernatur) and, jointly, a focus group is carried out, as well as participatory cartographies with the various key public actors , private and community. In this sense, the commune of San Bernardo has a great diversity of cultural and gastronomic landmarks, which carry history and identity in each of its intrinsic characteristics. Currently, the community is becoming even more interested in knowing, preserving and caring for its gastronomic heritage and local trades, which is why a tourism circuit has been implemented and developed, using the bicycle as a means of sustainable transport, interacting with various gastronomic landmarks and attractions of the commune. It is concluded that the implementation of the tourist cycle-routes has allowed to spread to the whole community the existence of sectors with great cultural and heritage wealth in the communes where it is applied, where the local population, especially the youth, learn to know their historical roots, customs, traditions and gastronomy.