Culture continues to be one of the most neglected aspects of culture in the Caribbean.
Saturday night there was a very nice outdoor performance of The Barber of Seville at the Cuartel de Ballajá, in Old San Juan. This enormous building has a spectacular interior courtyard which served as the stage for the Opera de Puerto Rico andOrquesta Sinfonica de Puerto Rico with an excellent cast performing the full-length opera with ’supertitles’ in Spanish.
Plus, it was FREE and even started more or less on time (an oddity here in Puerto Rico).
The seating area was completely filled with a large number of people standing (too bad they didn’t open the upper mezzanine areas for additional seating and better view).
It was so nice in fact that you could easily imagine yourself in Europe rather than the Caribbean – and we know that the combination of Europe and Caribbean is marketing magic for many islands.
It was a surprisingly good production and very well received by the audience – much of which left as we did, half-way through the second act, since there is no public transportation from Old San Juan after 11pm – even on weekends.
The turnout was especially surprising since it was very poorly promoted – I heard about it the morning of the event on the local English-language radio station. There was also an article in the paper the day of the performance.
There seemed to be very few tourists at the event, so I decided to check the Tourism Company’s website to see if this was promoted as a tourist event.
While it was nice to see that www.gotopuertorico.com now has a calendar of events – it had disappeared for some months – I was shocked to find that events are listed alphabeticly…. not by date! Who goes to a tourist site to check alpha listings? I want to know what is happening when I travel to a destination!
They call it a ‘calendar of events‘ but it is a ‘list of events’.
Calendars are organized by dates.
Lists are organized by title.
Needless to say, I didn’t find my opera – or anything else happening this weekend – since I didn’t want to take the time to check every listing and hunt and peck for dates among the listings.
Why can’t tourism departments ‘think like a tourist’ from time to time?
Certainly the government was involved in obtaining the space, providing generators, tents, employees, funding and permits for the event. It would have been nice if they had done a better job of promoting the event.
Events, Culture, Fairs, etc. are fantastic tourism advantages for destinations which want to increase visitors, extend stays and promote business at restaurants/bars/shops in the area of the events. Lots of planning went into this production – but no one thought about the audience…
If you island has a rich cultural heratige and/or special events – you can convert these into tourism dollars that filter throughout your local economy.
But you have to let the world know about it…
You have to give people access to it (and a way to get home afterward)….
Destinations that learn how to do this benefit greatly….