On Tuesday, October 15, more than twenty students from different careers at the Catholic University of Valparaíso visited the Las Salinas Plant Laboratory. They were students of the fundamental education course “Geography of Greater Valparaíso” taught by Luis Álvarez, director of the Institute of Geography of that university and member of the scientific committee for the reclamation of the land. About the initiative, Luis Álvarez commented that “the objective is that students of Agronomy, Architecture, Sociology, Education, Philosophy, Music -and in general of all the careers of the university-, see the great possibilities that arise from academic-private associativity, that is to say, when interests converge in favor of a broader purpose. The Las Salinas Vegetation Laboratory, for example, is a private initiative that seeks to recreate vegetational floors typical of the region in order to incorporate them into the city. And it is, at the same time, a research space for the University.” Regarding the process of cleaning up the Las Salinas site, Alvarez said, “The most interesting thing for the students on this first day is to be able to get to know what type of soil this is, to go to the pit to the level of soil contamination, managing to put together a perception of what this ‘myth’ that has been created around the site is all about, to clear up what they want to do there. Many sociologist students see it from the dimension of the participation process, engineers want to know about the remediation process, many architects want to know how the urban project is going, so we have to give space to all of them. In this sense, the place was quite interesting for all of them”.
