The initiative aims to contribute to promoting the tourist offer around birds and their habitat, incorporating requirements of respect for sustainability, good environmental practices and attention to the peculiarities of this tourism.

The initiative aims to contribute to promoting the tourist offer around birds and their habitat, incorporating requirements of respect for sustainability, good environmental practices and attention to the peculiarities of this tourism.

Likewise, the project seeks to avoid conservation problems that derive from tourist activity.

SEO/BirdLife, as a conservationist entity and as an association of ornithological tourism consumers, works to advise tourism initiatives and to train professionals in this field. In addition, it supports business initiatives that demonstrate that a differentiated tourist offer around birds – with well-trained personnel and knowing the peculiarities of the demand – contributes to the local creation of employment and wealth, and to the sustainable development of the regions where ornithological tourism can be done.

The recipients are professionals in the tourism sector (SMEs, micro-SMEs and the self-employed). Three types of professionals are identified as recipients of the project’s training activities in the environment of Natura 2000 Network areas:

• Hospitality industry. Professionals, companies and establishments that offer accommodation and catering services and that wish to access this demand for ornithological tourism.
• Tourism. Tourism professionals and companies, tourist guides and ornithologists (although there are legal gaps in the regulation of the figure of the ornithological guide).
• Technical. Workers in offices, centres and information or interpretation points.

The objectives to be achieved with the project are:

• Training of 450 recipients, although the project will reach 1,730 workers.
• Creation of a new consolidated company in ornithological tourism.
• Consolidation of a new line of business in ornithological and sustainable tourism.
• Implementation of a Tourism Revitalization Plan for the Sierra de las Cabras Nature Reserve (province of Albacete).