Loyse Vin­cent

The To­ba­go Her­itage Con­ser­va­tion So­ci­ety is con­vert­ing years of re­search, map­ping and ar­chae­o­log­i­cal re­trieval in­to a tourism project aimed at trans­form­ing To­ba­go in­to one of the most sought af­ter des­ti­na­tions for cul­tur­al tourism.

The group, led by Gabriel de Gae­tano, is work­ing with lo­cal and in­ter­na­tion­al or­gan­i­sa­tions to in­crease aware­ness of where these ru­ins are and what were their func­tions as part of an en­hanced To­ba­go tourism prod­uct.

Years of re­search have been dig­i­tized in­to a cod­ed map which has been clas­si­fied ac­cord­ing to the type of ru­ins at each site, then fur­ther sub­di­vid­ed in­to what they were used for. The group has record­ed more than 200 sites on the is­land,

de Gae­tano, who is al­so di­rec­tor of To­ba­go Af­fairs at the Eu­ro­pean Busi­ness Cham­ber, has been liv­ing in To­ba­go for 30. He said based on re­search col­lat­ed from lo­cal and Eng­lish based an­thro­pol­o­gists To­ba­go has a lot to of­fer in the area of her­itage built as­sets.

“You are go­ing to draw a map in the Rich­mond to Con­cor­dia area you are go­ing to see what they have and you can de­vel­op a na­ture trail and now you have a built tourism as­set, you have agri­cul­tur­al pro­duc­tion, you have plants, so par­tic­u­lar­ly peo­ple can cre­ate tourism in their area they can do tourism ac­tiv­i­ties and they cre­ate a small busi­ness,” he said

Com­mit­tee mem­ber Louis Vil­lian said To­ba­go’s tur­bu­lent past makes the is­land rich in his­to­ry, which tran­scends colo­nial arte­facts in­to nat­ur­al her­itage sites such as the Buc­coo Reef, the Rain For­rest. He said each na­tion­al­i­ty left their mark on the is­land in one way or an­oth­er.

“We have found ru­ins in when the ini­tial colo­nial pow­ers fought over To­ba­go the Eng­lish the French the Dutch, To­ba­go kept chang­ing hands we have his­tor­i­cal facts when the Amer­i­cans came,” he said.