The Ostional community guides spent the weekend at Las Galerias Mall in Managua to share their story and to promote Ostional as a tourism destination. Guided tours range from bird-watching hikes, to sea-kayaking trips. All guides (first four young women on the left) are young members of the local community. They are proud to know that they will benefit from ecological tourism.
At Paso Pacifico, in addition to working with donors, government entities, and other NGOs, we also work with private landowners to foster cooperation and habitat-friendly farming and planting and land-use practices.
Especially when working with home and hotel developers, we strongly encourage the use of native flora. We believe a healthy native plant population is one of the keys to saving many birds and other species from extinction.
We understand the desire to plant a bunch of palm trees and colorful euphorbia, instead of the pretty, drought tolerate natives, but one of the most important things to remember is that though we are in the tropics, we are in a tropical DRY forest zone.
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