Last year, the SOS Proteus Information Centre won the Green Destinations Top 100 Stories Award. This year, with your help, it could win the People’s Choice Award!
This year, the international organisation Green Destinations will be presenting the People’s Choice Award at the ITB fair in Berlin, alongside the awards from the expert jury. The People’s Choice Award is open to the winners of the Green Destinations Top 100 Stories awards, which also includes Kranj’s SOS Proteus.
Voting takes place between 15 and 29 January. You can cast your vote here.
The destination and story with the most votes will receive the award and be presented on stage as one of the most inspiring initiatives for the development of sustainable tourism at the prestigious ITB Berlin tourism conference on 6 March.
The Top 100 Stories included the story “With the olms we share the need for clean and drinkable groundwater”, which draws attention to the threat to cave biodiversity and symbolises the sense of purpose behind the efforts to preserve clean groundwater, the most important source of drinking water. The initiator, developer and manager of the centre is Gregor Aljančič, who is also the founder of the Tular Cave Laboratory Institute.
The main mission of the centre, located in Tunnels under the old town of Kranj, is to raise awareness about the threat to the cave salamanders, called olms and the importance of preserving underground sources of drinking water. Visitors are guided through the centre by information boards and video presentations, and the stars of the show are, of course, olms! On display are rescued olms that have been washed to the surface by groundwater floods, where they would otherwise not have survived. This display has no negative impact on nature and is animal-friendly. This is the concern of the researchers at the Tular Cave Laboratory, where they have been studying and protecting human fish for 60 years. At the same time, the SOS Proteus Information Centre is the first of its kind in the world to monitor the impact of visitors on olms
You can help the Centre to win by casting your vote by 29 January at the following link.
The SOS Proteus Info Centre is a public-private partnership project between the Tular Cave Laboratory, the Municipality of Kranj and the Tourism and Culture Board Kranj.
Photo: Aleš Komovec in Anže Krže
