The Talayotic Menorca candidacy for Unesco World Heritage in 2022 faces its decisive hours. In just a few months we will know if the island has achieved the prestigious distinction. It would be the culmination of a process in which the scientific sector, the public administration and a multitude of entities have worked side by side for years. A long road, much longer than was surely thought at the beginning, and that has involved communicating many processes that are often very complex for a large part of the population, but which were necessary to get exactly where we are now.
To face this decisive stage, we have drawn up a communication plan. A communication plan is a tool that companies and all sorts of entities and administrations usually use, a document that defines the communication strategies and the actions that must be carried out to achieve an objective, in this case being nominated World Heritage. This aim implies explaining what we are and what we do, what audience we want to address at each moment, how we do it and what message we convey to them. To prepare it, we held meetings with professionals linked to the candidacy, such as the director of the Museu de Menorca, Carolina Desel; the president of the Scientific Council of the IME, Cristina Rita; and with cultural managers such as the creator of the Tarraco Viva festival, Magí Seritjol. Afterwards, we did a study to define all the segments of audiences (local, national and international) we want to address and the agents that could help us to reach them. We highlighted the strengths but also the weaknesses of the candidacy, we reviewed the most representative actions that had been carried out so far and, based on all this, we proposed 83 new actions, of which 8 will take place from now until end of the year. This plan is a living document, with the will to last beyond the candidacy and to be used beyond July 2022.
Among the proposals, there are some that have already been done, for example, an artisan product such as the Talayotic beer; others have been carried out recently, such as the visit of the Spanish ambassador to UNESCO; and others will be held in the coming months, such as the presentations of the candidacy in each town of Menorca or carrying out a program of school workshops.
What we propose is to establish synergies with other platforms, such as Menorca European Gastronomic Region, the Biosphere Reserve brand or Menorca Starlight in order to save costs and take advantage of the visibility they have. for example, this has already been done recently with the European Food Gift Challenge. The plan also gives tools to make Archeology more accessible and rediscover our common heritage.
We start with the premise that we only love what we know, and when we know something we then value, study and protect it. In this sense, the pandemic that we are experiencing has revealed to us what it means to live in a limited territory such as an island, which requires a sustainable management of resources and everyone’s efforts to keep functioning.
All of this also brings us back to our Talayotic past. The dimension of the Talayotic culture constructions instills the collective effort carried out by a small community with few resources and a way of life based on sustainability. Now is the time to make very clear the importance of a unique civilization, with an identity and a way of being in the world that has survived through centuries in the archaeological monuments and the landscape that surrounds us.