Estrategias de reactivación de economías deprimidas con base en el desarrollo de cocinas regionales en Portoviejo (Manabí, Ecuador), 2016-2020

Natural disasters have serious consequences for the development of the affected local communities, partially or totally paralyzing their economic, social and cultural activities. This happened after the strong earthquake of April 16, 2016 in the Ecuadorian province of Manabí, which produced a large number of deaths and injuries and seriously damaged the hotel infrastructure, with serious affectation of the activities of tourism in the sun and beach modality that were developed in the province, which receives its economic boost from the tourism sector. In order to reactivate the economic and social dynamics of the canton of Portoviejo (capital of the province), the Municipal Government carried out from 2016 to 2020 a series of activities related to regional cuisine, such as gastronomic festivals in rural parishes and a gastronomic competition (the Culinary Cup), among the popular women cooks of such parishes. In conjunction with these activities and for the recognition of Portoviejo as a Creative Gastronomic City, an application to this UNESCO initiative was also made, designation that was approved by this body in 2019. In this context, this article aims to evaluate the efficiency of these measures as reactivating elements in a post-disaster area. For this purpose, a qualitative type of research was conducted, applying a combination of deductive and inductive methods, from a historical-comparative perspective during the period 2016-2020. The information for the analysis was collected through field observation techniques, as well as documentary research, surveys, interviews and focus groups. The main conclusion of the study is that the intervention measures promoted by the Municipal Government (among them, the gastronomic festivals led by the GAD Municipal de Portoviejo, based on the traditional dishes of each locality; the Culinary Cup, the declaration of traditional dishes as national heritage and the declaration by UNESCO as a Creative City in the Gastronomy category), with the active participation of local communities, fulfilled (on the scale of the experience and in the modality of national gastronomic tourism) the purposes set out to revitalize local communities depressed by the action of the severe earthquake that severely affected them.