They call to save Mexican magic town threatened by tourism

Different personalities of the Mexican society today made an appeal to save the population of Real de Catorce, considered a "magical town" and a point of Christian pilgrimage. indigenous, before the consequences of mass tourism as the accumulation of waste.

Mexico, Nov 22 (EFE) .- Different personalities of the Mexican society today made an appeal to save the population of Real de Catorce, considered a "magical town" and a point of Christian and indigenous pilgrimage, before the consequences of mass tourism as the accumulation of waste.

"My village is injured and in danger, the streams are asphyxiated by the pollution, the mountains fill with garbage and the landscape turns gray while clamoring for help ", denounced the filmmaker Petra Puente, promoter of the Real de Catorce Foundation presented this Wednesday in Mexico City.

Real de Catorce is a historic mountainous town of 1,300 inhabitants located in the central state of San Luis de Potosí and whose population was reduced drastically when the silver mines that sustained its economy ceased to be productive.

Recently, however, the tourist interest of Real de Catorce has increased due to its architecture, its landscapes and the existence of sacred places for Christianity and for some indigenous peoples of the region.

"Of 107 hotel rooms we have climbed to 600. We received 1.2 million visitors a year, 1,500 every weekend, "explained Puente, who argued that this entails environmental problems and conservation of heritage.

Among the proposals of the Foundation highlights a project so that the only way to access the town, which is flanked by mountains, is an electric tram that crosses the only tunnel of entrance to the town given that "cars do not fit".

Be that as it may, the filmmaker warned that her goal is not to reduce the number of tourists, since the economy of the town is based on the tourism.

The Foundation was supported by personalities such as Juan Ramón de la Fuente, former director of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), who explained that Real de Catorce is a "multicultural" people that are "eroding."

"We need an orderly development that protects their traditions with a tourism that preserves and not a tourism that devastates", he added.

" admires a town that preserves the prehispanic tradition and that allows us to peek into the spiritual tradition based on the cult of nature that existed before the arrival of Europeans ", said historian Víctor Sánchez, who has studied the indigenous peoples of the region for 30 years.

Engineer Jorge Treviño Aguado, meanwhile, announced an agreement collaboration of the Foundation with the Government of the municipality of Catorce, where the town is, to treat and manage the waste generated by the increase in visitors.

To the act, which It took place in the Museum of Anthropology of the capital, attended by the municipal president of Catorce, Francisco Daniel Calderón, and representatives of the Ministry of Tourism of Mexico.