Gennargentu National Park (Sardinia)
The aim of the project was to stimulate, through an innovative didactic model based on the active involvement of the participants, the experimentation of a development of the tourist offer system which may allow to solve the current problems in the management of the tourist flows. All that is possible through the creation of a more visible and credible network of services which may constantly react to the new market trends.
In order to reach the objectives established, a preliminary analysis of the area was necessary. The aim of this analysis is to identify the real needs of the different areas and find out the right tools to answer those needs.
Two very important problems were highlighted from the very beginning: the remarkable sense of independence and individualism of the people of the Barbagia (the area in Sardinia where the Park is located) who hardly accept any projects of common activities and the excessive distrust for what comes from outside.
It was therefore very difficult to work in this situation, on behalf of an institution like the WWF which was seen just as an imposer of restrictions in an area with a historical lack of controls, hence useful for a certain kind of organized crime which unfortunately has the strength to condition the will of the inhabitants in those areas.
The idea to organize a course to be seen not as an imposition of external solutions with respect to the culture and people of the area, but as a way to find out the tools to defeat integration and exchange difficulties came out from the effort to look for a constructive way to communicate with the tourist operators of the area and because of the total lack of exchanges between the same operators.

Description of the
intervention and
of training courses:
This is how the course "The Integrated Tourist Offer" was created; it was addressed to tourist operators from Oliena and Orgosolo, two towns 10 km far from each other, but with a mutual historical hostility which has always kept them divided. Therefore, the first challenge was to bring together people from Oliena and people from Orgosolo in the same workshop and to encourage them to see the others for what they were and not for where they came from. The second challenge was to identify a course program that could produce concrete tools in a short time. The only way to convince these people, who were still not very convinced, that it was really possible to obtain results from themselves was to establish concretely achievable objectives.
Therefore, our goal was the creation of a consortium which could, if not totally at least partly, solve the problems of the present tourist organization overcoming the individualism of the local tourist offer which underwent a lack of coordination and was often poor.
But this pioneer experiment in the workshop needed to meet a real situation through the practical study of consortiums already existing since a few years which were able to suggest some interesting organization and management ideas to the tourist operators of that area of Sardinia.
That is why a training course was organized in an area where a consortium and a natural protected area already existed.

Results and consequences
for the participants
and for the area
As far as the results achieved are concerned, they are perhaps bigger than the expectations. A more than fair integration and a good level of exchange were actually created in the workshops. We passed from an abstract hypothesis of collaboration forms to the concrete elaboration of "packages" to be proposed already from the next season: some excursion operators from Oliena and Orgosolo experimented both the implementation time and the difficulties of a process designed during the workshops and applied – this was something new and extraordinary – in the area of the two towns.
The importance of these results was well understood by the mountain community in the province of Nuoro, so much that it was decided to uphold the ADAPT project allocating a contribution to the expenses for some stages of the course.
All the participants that started from the beginning attended the course until the end and this shows the high level of interest it created.
The Provincial Council of Nuoro undertook to give the economical support for the implementation of the "packages" designed in the workshops, paying for the printing of information pamphlets and brochures.
In this way, it is clear that the ADAPT project became the basis for other initiatives and opened the way to new projects which may be related to it.

Orgosolo (Gennargentu N.P.):
murales