Ministry of Tourism Hosts Mundo Maya Organization

 

The Mundo Maya is a region that includes parts of five countries in Central America, including Belize where the Maya civilization once flourished. In 1992, these five countries came together to establish the Mundo Maya Organization to develop the region’s cultural value and promote it to tourists. The Ministry of Tourism took on the presidency of the Mundo Maya organization in January. This week, the ministry is hosting delegates from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala for strategic planning sessions. These delegates will also be participating in the National Institute of Culture and History’s annual archeological symposium set to begin on Wednesday in San Ignacio. We stopped in at the strategic planning session here in Belize City where we spoke with Nicole Solano the C.E.O in the Ministry of Tourism, as well as Honduras’ Vice Minister of Tourism.

 

Nicole Solano, Chief Executive Officer, Ministry of Tourism

“As you know, archaeology is an important part of the tourism product. We work all the time closely with the institute to make sure we can develop those sites with tourism infrastructure and for the tourism product. So we continue to work along with them. the symposium begins tomorrow and that will run Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. But, our Mundo Maya delegates will actually do presentations in the afternoon tomorrow so they will be talking about tourism best practices and a number of things. The idea of Mundo Maya is to have regional integration where we come together behind the common product of the Maya history and heritage. So we are talking not only of the archaeological sites. You have Chicen Itza in Mexico, Tikal in Guatemala, Copan in Honduras, in Belize we have Characol as one of our large sites.”

 

Reizel Vilorio, Vice Minister of Tourism, Honduras

“We have important cities in the Mayan culture. We have Copan which are really important and attractive for tourism around the world. Honduras has two main products which is the coral reef, we are with Belize, we have the second largest barrier reef in the world. And, we have the Maya heritage which we have focus on Copan. But it is really important because people of different countries love knowing and getting to learn about cultures. They want to come to our countries and see what we have. As we have a product in common with all these five countries it is important we develop multi-destination packages so that tourists can travel around these destinations and see what we have in the lower cost and the longer stays.”