Sunken and Coastal heritage as driver of local developement

The goal is empowering youth as drivers of heritage recovery and sustainable promotion. Tourism in Spain was a predator industry in the sixties, and the change of paradigms must be reinforced. Our project inivites young universitary students to become protagonists. Depending on their education and speciality, they are responsible for investigating a shipwreck (historic period, links to other countries, local and international impact...). Reports are used by students of Arts to design comics. Our aim is offering those comics through our website and FB in a friendly way, in order to make history accesible, including main messages about environmental impact. Specially in those shipwrecks that produced desvastating conseuences on maritime and coastal nature. Appart from the impact of each shipwreck, connecting underwater hetritage with tourism makes posiible to reinforce those messages relationed with rational enviromental behaviour, as they can directly see the impact of rubish (speciallly plastics) on the ocean. As it is said, "you can not love what you don´t know, you will not protect what you don´t love", and we think that sensibilizating and involving youth is an essential step in this task. On the other hand, coastal local population is absolutely dependent on sea, and the project contributes to make visible the importance of sunken and coastal heritage, the need of a sustainable fishery industry, and potential connections between extractive activities and tourism promotion to reinforce domestic economies. Up to this moment, 8 shipwrecks have been investigated and 4 comics have been published in our websire and social networks. We´ve organised 4 mmetings with stake holders from all over Galicia to present the potential of this resources. A more ambitious project has been presented to European Union Comission to promote international collaboration in this tasks. As a first step, we are suggesting to include Portugal. A second step will be considering the Atlantic Area, even though we´d like to include any part of the globe in which sunken heritage can serve as a conector among different cultures and promoter of sustainable patterns. Our first goal is promoting sensibilisation of followers. We estimate about 90,000 visits to our web site along first year. Sensibilizating / educating stakes holders: we contacted and met 100% of the organisations that coordinates coastal areas activities. Internacionalisation: organisations from Portugal were identified and located. Meetings with Managers were held and a consortium was created to present a proposal to European Union Consell (INTERREG funding). We´d be happy if organisations from everywhere joined this project, but at this moment we´re focused on next step: Portugal. Secondly, we´ll make a call to any organisation fom Atlantic Area countries. Rithym of the project will obviously depend on financial support we can obtain.... Regional Galician Television has just launch a very interesting serial of documentals in relation to shipwrecks in front of Galician coast that is supporting our initiatives (http://www.crtvg.es/tvg/programas/buscadores-de-naufraxios-1). We expect to discuss potential sinergies in next future, and promote sustainablity patterns to their perspective.