Alba Martí Florit’s journey to La Araucanía did not begin when she bought her ticket. It began, she writes, “when I sat down for the first time in front of a hearth” in Curarrehue, in the Chilean Andes. Fourteen days living around the clock with a Mapuche family became Conscious Araucanía, a free ebook and one of the most thoughtful final projects to come out of our Master in Travel Journalism. It is, above all, a practical guide to visiting Mapuche communities as a guest rather than as a tourist.
Read Conscious Araucanía, the full ebook, here
Who is Alba Martí Florit?
Alba was born in Menorca and lives in Kraków. “Two places that couldn’t be more different,” as she puts it, “yet both feel like home.” She came to the Master in Travel Journalism with a background in tourism and a long-held pull towards culture and human connection, and with one clear idea: she wanted to tell stories that come from listening, not just looking.
For her final project she chose La Araucanía, in southern Chile, and a subject that asks a lot of any journalist: the leadership, resilience and daily life of women in Mapuche communities, and the role that community-based tourism can play in them.
What is Conscious Araucanía?
Conscious Araucanía: An ethical guide for cultural engagement with the Mapuche people is an illustrated ebook of six chapters. It is the service piece of a much larger project that Alba built on her site Between Sun and Snow: a documentary, a podcast, a photo essay, a series of articles and first-person field notes.
The guide opens with a line that sums up its intention:
“This guide will not teach you how to visit La Araucanía; it will provide you with the tools to become the kind of guest that Mapuche communities are open to welcoming.”
From there it moves from worldview to logistics to etiquette, and closes at the kitchen table.
How should you visit a Mapuche community?
The short answer from the guide: slowly, with permission, and through the people who live there. Alba frames it as three shifts in mindset, which she calls the pillars of the guest:
- You stop being a customer. You are entering someone’s home, not a living museum.
- You observe before you participate. Silence and patience come first.
- You practise reciprocity. What you receive, you give back, starting with paying fair local prices.
The chapter she calls “The engagement handbook” turns that into concrete behaviour. Arrive calmly and greet everyone with mari mari. Introduce yourself honestly, explaining why you are there. Look for the heads of the household, the elders or the longko, the traditional community authority. And her golden rule: never assume an open space is a public space.
On photography, the guidance is just as clear: always ask for explicit consent, put the phone away during sacred moments, credit local initiatives when you post, and never treat traditional dress as a costume or a prop.
What is community-based tourism in Araucanía?
Community-based tourism (CBT) is a model in which the community itself plans, runs and benefits directly from tourism in its territory. There is no corporate intermediary, and the families who host visitors keep control of their own story.
Alba explains why this matters in practice. In the traditional model, the land is a stage for consumption and the profits go to large operators. In CBT, the land is a living home and the money stays with local families. You will not find these stays on the big booking platforms: first contact usually happens by phone or WhatsApp, often through local facilitators such as Rutas Ancestrales Araucarias, and replies can take days because there is no signal up in the mountains.
The guide also prepares you for the reality of the place: unstable or absent connectivity, heating and cooking with firewood, and one or two local buses a day. It includes a seasonal “calendar of the Earth”, from the autumn pine nut harvest to We Tripantu, the Mapuche New Year, in winter.
Why Curarrehue, and not Pucón?
This is one of the strongest passages in the ebook, and one of the most journalistic. Curarrehue lies about 40 minutes from Pucón, the region’s busy tourism hub, on the road to the Argentine border. Alba describes the drive as crossing an invisible border: the lake, the smooth tarmac and the commercial signs fall away, and you enter gravel roads, native forest and mountain silence.
This is the Pewenmapu, the land of the pewen or araucaria tree, which the Pewenche people consider a protective ancestor. Its seed, the ngülliu (pine nut), has been at the heart of their food sovereignty for centuries. In Alba’s words, what changes is not only the landscape but “your posture toward the territory”. In Curarrehue, the greatest value is not what you buy but who you sit down to talk with.
The practical details that make a guide useful
What lifts Conscious Araucanía above a reflective essay is how usable it is. A few of the tips any traveller can take away:
- Carry cash from Pucón. Curarrehue’s only ATM often runs out, and haggling is considered disrespectful.
- Learn a few words of Mapudungun. Mari mari (hello), chaltumay (thank you), kümei (it is good).
- Know the mate etiquette. Only the cebador serves, and you hand the cup straight back. And a warning that could save you an afternoon: only say chaltumay when you do not want any more. Say it in the first round and you will be skipped for the rest of the gathering.
- Leave no trace at Laguna Quillelhue. There are no bins, and araucaria saplings grow only centimetres per decade, so stay on the marked path.
The guide ends with the places Alba trusts: La Cocina de Elisa, the Curarrehue restaurant where Elisa Cea cooks ancestral Pewenche food (her recommendation is the pine nut tart with pine nut coffee); the Trawupeyum intercultural village and its fair trade crafts; and the home of Isidora and Silverio, the family who hosted her. The final chapter, “Flavours of the hearth”, covers catuto, sopaipillas, tortilla al rescoldo and mountain pantrucas.
What this final project shows about travel journalism
At STJ, the final project is designed as a professional calling card, and Alba’s shows what that means. She did not visit Araucanía; she lived there, asked permission, and came back with material across every format: film, audio, photography, long-form articles and a practical guide.
It also shows something harder to teach: ethical judgement. Her podcast, for example, is built around a real dilemma in the field, a woman who asked for compensation for her voice and her story, and Alba’s decision to respect her choice not to be recorded. That kind of self-questioning is exactly what separates travel journalism from travel content.
Congratulations, Alba. And thank you for reminding all of us that the best stories begin by asking permission.
If you would also like to turn a place you care about into a professional project, with one-to-one mentoring from start to finish, take a look at the Master in Travel Journalism. You can also browse more student projects in our Student Work Showcase Hub, or read how Bianca Timofte turned her final project into a job in the UAE.
