Sardinia Geopark and smart tourism network. The project of the ‘pilgrim way’ of Santa Barbara

he Historical Environmental Geological Park of Sardinia has been recognized by UNESCO in 1998 as a high expression of mining culture. Based in the Sulcis-Iglesiente lead-zinc old mining district,in one of the geologically older regions of Italy, the Park consists of eight areas, belonging to 81 different municipalities spread in the whole Sardinia, for a total of about 3500 km². As recently highlighted by UNESCO commission (January 2018) the perimetration of the Park areas still discontinuous. This recalls the need for interventions, under penalty of forfeiture of the UNESCO acknowledgment. The ‘pilgrim way’ of Santa Barbara has been proposed as a best practice in a project called TSulki (Tourism and Sustainability in Sulcis, funded by the Sardinia Regional Administration and inserted in the 'PIANO SULCIS' program - SULCIS-821319), finalized to improve tighter connections between different areas in the Park. The project is intended to organize and manage information related to cultural, scientific, geo-environmental,tourist and port resources of the Park, united by the historical memories of mining district, to favor the use of ancient itineraries, for a length of about 400 Km and 24 stops through the main mining localities of the area. The itinerary retraces the places of worship dedicated to the Saint venerated by miners, developing along the ancient mining paths where the extraordinary technical-scientific (e.g. geological/mineralogical features), historical-cultural (e.g. industrial archeology) and landscape-environmental heritage of the mining epic is preserved.A detailed GPS survey of the routes has been accomplished, and track data were stored in shape format, then readable directly from the arcGIS software, allowing to develop a series of themes related to material and to immaterial (culture. For each of the 24 stages of the 400 km of the path, descriptive sheets of all the elements of the survey and of available official sources were made.From the point of view of the TSulki project, the numerous routes of the “Santa Barbara pilgrim way” may be easily placed in the wider geo-mining Park system, being able to generate a new mesh of connections between the inside (internal) and outside (coastal) areas, through the networking of privileged nodes of cultural and geo-environmental tourist itineraries.