Tapping heritage tourism
When you think of all the tourist destinations in the world, postcard views, delicious food and wildly good times come to mind. But in Newfoundland, one town has turned its root cellars – a vestige of the region’s hardscrabble past – into a drawing card for visitors. It is one of many heritage-based tourism efforts in Newfoundland that could be relevant to Maine’s coastal towns.
Natalie Springuel, a member of the University of Maine Marine Extension Team, spent six months in the Canadian province researching the rise of tourism in the wake of the cod fishery collapse and subsequent cod moratorium of 1992. For 500 years, cod had been the province’s major industry, and when the fishery dried up, tens of thousands of Newfoundlanders were out of work.
“What can we in Maine learn from Newfoundland?” asks Springuel, who is based at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. “In Newfoundland, tourism is a really important part of their economic revitalization approach.”
Members of the UMaine Marine Extension Team, a collaboration of Maine Sea Grant and University of Maine Cooperative Extension, live and work along the coast, providing Maine citizens educational and applied research programs in coastal community development, ecosystem health, fisheries and aquaculture.
Springuel’s outreach includes working with tour operators, guides, naturalists, those in sustainable tourism and fishermen, to name a few. Though she plans to write a book based on her research in Newfoundland, some of her findings have immediate and practical resonance for Down East towns.
Maine’s economy is already diverse, and unlike Newfoundland’s, it has been for centuries. But there are many parallels between the two regions, and those parallels – a dramatic coastline, a relatively pristine rural setting and an authentic heritage of working the sea – are central to tourism efforts on both sides of the border.
“What’s interesting is that as tourism is really emerging, there are some beautiful models,” Springuel says. “When you look at the real success stories, it’s tourism that highlights that maritime heritage.”
Ironically, those success stories often rise from unpleasant events and circumstances in province history. For instance, root cellars were a necessity for year-round sustenance on the island. Today, Elliston calls itself the root cellar capital of the world with 150 of them. Springuel found exhibits based on an ill-fated seal hunting expedition and successful tours to outlying ports that were abandoned, ghost-town style, when the government closed entire communities in a cost-saving effort to centralize services.
“Newfoundlanders figured out how to turn hardship into a compelling thing that the public wants to learn about,” she says.
Springuel’s research, conducted as an “experiential tourist,” included interviews, travel and dialogue with locals, visitors and those working in the tourism industry. She found the greatest successes came when residents weren’t just supportive, but active and invested.
