La artesanía del “Panama Hat” y su preservación en el Economuseo Municipal Casa del Sombrero en Cuenca-Ecuador

Abstract

The toquilla straw hat inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity is a cultural tourist attraction in the city of Cuenca-Ecuador, known worldwide as Panama Hat. The article reviews the history of the toquilla straw weaving and analyzes the workshops that are given in the Economuseo Municipal Casa del Sombrero, it considers the consequences for the conservation of this tradition, which is close to 200 years of development, of cultural and economic importance, and great tourist interest. Methodologically, the work is inscribed in a quantitative-qualitative vision that identifies and processes pertinent information from academic and scientific articles, analyzes data from official entities by means of descriptive statistical tools, in the light of concepts of cultural tourism. The work establishes the sociodemographic characteristics of the people who enrolled in the workshops, their motivations, the execution or not of what they learned and the expectations of application, thus configuring the perspective for crafts in future study. Young people have little interest of the in the toquilla straw weaving: the socio-demographic characteristics of the people who take toquilla straw weaving workshops are made up of women between 20 and 60 years of age who have this work as a complement to their main economic activity, while the interest among men is marginal.