In 1819, Simon Bolivar and Franciso de Paula Santander led a diverse army from the border of Venezuela to Bogotá to liberate what is today Colombia from the Spanish crown. Over 77 days, 40 municipalities, 6 provinces, and several battles, the Army of Independence sent Spain back to Europe.
OpEPA Awarded National Contract
Because of this historic march that led the army through the high mountains of the Andes to take the Spanish by surprise, the Government of Colombia decided to transform the march route into a touristic route to benefit the many communities touched by the passage of Bolivar and his soldiers. The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Tourism through its FONTUR awarded the contract to OpEPA, a national non-profit specializing in outdoor education and heritage interpretation. OpEPA had developed its skills in interpretation thanks in part to a long partnership between the PUP Collaboratory and OpEPA dating back to 2010. In that time, the two organizations along with the National Parks of Colombia have developed their interpretive capacity and deployed interpretive frameworks to parks across this vast country.
Greatest Application of PUP´s Interpretive Framework Methodology
This methodology originally designed by PUP as far back as 1997 but improved with OpEPA through its work in Colombia involves the facilitation of community-based consensus workshops to determine for a given natural-cultural heritage site its outstanding heritage elements, interpretive themes, universal processes and forces that created the site and continue to transform it, and its essence. These basic elements allow a site to be interpreted; further, they are usually represented on a single sheet of paper followed by more extensive narrative descriptions. Given then OpEPA´s experience in developing participatory community-based interpretive frameworks as well as a related participatory process to facilitate the design of community-based tourism products, the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Tourism selected OpEPA to carry out the project.
PUP, as subcontractor, facilitated the development of seven interpretive frameworks, one for each department or province through which Bolivar´s army marched (2 however were not on the actual route but played key roles in the planning the independence campaign) and a seventh that integrated all the others, much like the ring of power that bound all the others.
Though the interpretive framework has been used many times not only in Colombia but other countries in Latin America and the United States, this application constitutes its most ambitious use. It not only integrated several subnational frameworks, but may have been the principal reason that OpEPA won the contract and applied it in such a high-profile national project.
OpEPA and the Ministry launched the touristic route to great effect on 28 July 2025 at the Boyacá Bridge, site of one of the famous battles along the Liberation Route of Colombia.
For more information contact crosero@opepa.org or info@pupconsortium.net
Additional resources in Spanish and English about interpretive frameworks
