The Province of Samar partnered with the University of Santo Tomas Graduate School-Center for Conservation of Cultural Property and Environment (USTGS-CCCPET) in a province-wide Cultural Mapping Project aimed at documenting the natural and cultural heritage of 24 municipalities and 2 cities.
Starting in September 2017, Assoc. Prof. Eric Zerrudo trained 116 cultural mappers— predominantly public school teachers and municipal tourism or planning officers— to document the natural, built, movable, and intangible heritage of their assigned towns and cities. These main mappers subsequently trained the barangay mappers, which were selected from the Provincial Government’s pool of young scholars, to document each barangay. Thus, the mapping project is estimated to have covered more than 900 barangays of the province.
Samar Governor Sharee Ann Tan, who recently launched her administration’s anchor project “Spark Samar” tourism campaign, initiated this large-scale project. The data gathered is intended to become the jump-off point for meaningful programs, projects and policies for the province’s different sectors, especially for environment, tourism and education.
The Samar Cultural Mapping is one of the few province-wide mapping projects of CCCPET, and the first to generate a rich multi-volume database of the province’s natural and cultural heritage using new and improved heritage mapping templates developed by Assoc. Prof. Zerrudo.
The Cultural Mapping Graduation will be held on May 21, 2018 in Catbalogan City.