Pasiegos en el foco. El Museo Etnográfico de las Tres Villas Pasiegas

Abstract

In recent decades, there has been a growing interest in ethnographic heritage, not only in the academic community, but among the communities, which seeks to understand the past development of the spaces it inhabits and its own roots. In this context, numerous initiatives arise in the rural setting to disseminate the characteristic aspects of the populations that shaped those territories, as is the case of the Ethnographic Museum of the Three Pasiega Villages, founded in 1988, and located in Vega de Pas (Cantabria, Spain). The purpose of this museum is related to an important spectrum in the process of heritage preservation: dissemination, in addition to their role as tourist attraction, and representing and interpreting human action in these cultural landscapes. This article main objective is to analyse the Museum de from the perspective of ethnographic research, in order to understand how it adapts the contents on pasieguería, and in what way it relates to the territory it occupies. For this purpose, the article presents and analyses the museum and its museography. We also propose an analysis following the SWOT model, which highlights the strengths and opportunities of the museum in relation to space and contents. The museum reflects a careful selection of objects and adaptation to the environment, but reveals a non-existent educational strategy adapted to a diverse audience, which denotes the complicated situation of local museums of small scale, where resources are limited and sustainability is challenged.

Keywords

• ethnographic museum
• local museum
• sustainability
• cultural landscape
• Ethnographic Museum of the Three Pasiega Villages