Some students finish their master’s with a final project. Mario Lorenzo finished with a voice. A Spanish journalist who writes as Mario Trotamundos, he completed the Master in Travel Journalism at the School of Travel Journalism (class of 2025) and turned his travel journalism final project into a documentary, a podcast and regular radio work in Spain and Latin America.
His story answers a question we hear a lot: can a master’s project really open doors with the media? Here is how it did for him.
Who is Mario Trotamundos?
On his website, Mario describes himself as a journalist by vocation and a traveller at heart. He has travelled to more than 50 countries with one clear obsession: popular festivals, folklore and ritual. Not as postcards, but as a way into a place’s living culture.
On mariotrotamundos.com he gathers stories, photo essays and interviews from India’s Holi, Gai Jatra in Kathmandu and, above all, Bolivia’s Carnival of Oruro, the festival that became the heart of his final project.
A final project built from local voices
The Carnival of Oruro takes place almost 4,000 metres above sea level. Tens of thousands of dancers and musicians make a pilgrimage to the Virgin of the Socavón in one of the great festivals of the Andes.
Mario first stumbled into it in 2014, as a backpacker. In 2025 he went back as a journalist, for his final project, with a reporter’s question: why had it captivated him so much?
The answer took shape in three formats, something we push hard on the master’s:
- Documentary. Carnaval de Oruro (Bolivia): Un éxtasis cerca del cielo, on his YouTube channel.
- Podcast. En viaje y alma, with the audio series Voices of the Carnival of Oruro: a historian, a musician, a designer, an architect who dances in the Morenada Central and other people who keep the festival alive.
- Writing and photography. Stories on Oruro’s dances, music, rituals and food on his website.
This is the approach we teach: don’t describe a place from the outside, tell it through the people who sustain it. It is also what made his work interesting to editors and producers.
How did a master’s project lead to radio work?
A strong final project shouldn’t sit in a drawer. Mario’s went on air almost as soon as he finished it.
In December 2025, Colombia’s Blu Radio interviewed him on its travel show about Oruro, the place he first visited as a backpacker and returned to as an immersive journalist (read the piece). Since then he has become a regular guest and contributor on travel programmes on national and regional radio in Spain, first on Oruro and then on Holi, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico and Colombia, with a recurring travel segment of his own on a local station. He has also been a guest on independent travel podcasts.
What can you learn from Mario’s path?
If you want your own work to reach the media, his story leaves some practical lessons:
- Specialise. Mario isn’t just another traveller: he is the person who knows about festivals. That makes it easy for a producer to know when to call him.
- Have your own material, ready to hear and watch. A podcast and a documentary prove you can tell a story with sound and image. They are your best calling card.
- Bring voices, not just opinions. Interviews with local people give a show something it doesn’t have: first-hand testimony.
- Turn one appearance into the next. One interview about Oruro became regular contributions and a segment of his own.
- Keep pitching. As you read this, Mario is doing fieldwork in Guatemala on the giant kites of Sumpango and Santiago Sacatepéquez, a Kaqchikel tradition added to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2024. He is also working on a documentary about the Night of the Dead (Noche de Ánimas) in Michoacán, Mexico.
What this says about the Master in Travel Journalism
Mario’s story sums up what we want for every student: to graduate with a project of their own, publishable and multi-format, and with the craft to take it to the media.
If you have a story only you can tell, the Master in Travel Journalism is where you can give it shape and a voice.
