Programme for the promotion and dissemination of maritime culture
Maritimity is a common concept that permeates all the objectives of the Coastal Plan. One of the great challenges is to incorporate all the attributes that maritimity has to offer into the public’s collective imaginary in order to make Barcelona a maritime city.
This goal must be pursued in a cross-cutting manner, touching on different areas such as the sustainability of the maritime environment and the coast, the blue economy, openness and accessibility to the sea, etc. However, the participatory process of the Coastal Plan has highlighted the need to develop a programme to promote and disseminate the city’s maritime culture.
The concept of maritime culture encompasses all the social phenomena where the economic, ecological and anthropological spheres are interconnected and which have some relation with the coastal-maritime environment.
The programme for the promotion and dissemination of maritime culture focuses on:
- Recovering maritime themes through sea-related events and as part of city festivals, giving value to World Oceans and Seas Day by promoting initiatives linked to sea sports, educational activities, oceanographic and citizen science, marine literature, etc.
- Promoting new uses for the coastline that make it accessible to the public, encouraging access to water sports, as well as drawing up and disseminating a joint, cross-cutting agenda.
- Enhancing mutual knowledge among the existing coastal entities in order to create synergies with a civic purpose.
- Introducing knowledge of the sea into the educational project of schools, promoting a specific training programme for future teachers of infants and primary schoolchildren, as well as introducing secondary school teachers to sea subjects so that it becomes a cross-curricular and central element in the curricula of schools, especially in coastal neighbourhoods.
- Giving visibility to libraries specialising in maritime themes.
- Rethinking the area of the Moll d’Espanya, currently focused on consumerism and tourism, and redirect it towards becoming a space that helps to bring maritime culture to the city.
- Promoting the transformation of spaces as interpretation centres that motivate people to visit them with the aim of changing views and giving them a closer look at sea culture.
- Improving the dissemination and communication of information on maritime culture in order to give visibility to all projects by promoting their dissemination through the media.
The aim of the programme is to attract people to the sea and the coastline, improve and look after these areas, and increase appreciation for them, so that people feel as though they belong to them.
What are we doing?
The main actions that have been carried out are as follows:
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Development of the Sea Classroom project. From November 2021 to April 2022, a study was launched to survey the online educational offer available to primary and secondary schools for learning about the sea and the coast, resulting in a systematised catalogue. This study resulted in two reports in 2022. An assessment of marine and coastal education, which has made it possible to identify current trends and areas that need to be strengthened, and a second report on the platforms used by teachers to disseminate teaching-learning activities related to the sea and the coast.
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Activities promoted through the ICM/CSIC [Institute of Marine Sciences] in relation to Ocean Cities.
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World Ocean Week and World Ocean Day programmes.
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Blue Saturday in the Olympic Port.
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Creation of the educational kit on marine biodiversity for schools.
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Science Congress, an educational programme on the theme ‘The sea is life’.
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Young People Tackling the Climate Emergency: Sea, Coast and Climate Change (educational programme).
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Oceanic Cities programme in the municipal Beach Centre.
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Line of funding for marine projects.
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Development of the 2023-2024 Mirada Blava [Blue Perspective] project. This project aims to promote blue education in school curricula. The aim is to highlight the educational opportunities offered by organisations that run activities and programmes related to the sea and the coast, and to help schools integrate these activities and programmes into the classroom.
The project aims to improve the promotion of these maritime and coastal activities by providing standardised information to increase their visibility and accessibility, helping to link them to school curricula and other complementary activities related to the sea. This means continuing these activities, broadening their scope, developing them further and helping them to become established in school curriculum.
The initiatives carried out include:
- Defining a set of values and criteria for educational projects and activities.
- Developing a good practice guide to facilitate self-diagnosis of activities.
- Developing a tool for compiling educational resources to complement curricular learning.
- Compilation of educational activities around the sea (catalogue).
