Cultural Recovery & Social Activation

The Aldeas de Paz work center in Chalma is made up of a group of young professionals, committed to the social and cultural well-being of their community. The main objective is social integration, through cultural and recreational activities with the different sectors of society, elderly, youth, and children. Aldeas de Paz is promoting a new community center located in one of the most important pilgrimage sites on the continent. Chalma’s needs and problems are huge, but we also promote a lot of solutions. We want to foster social change but face one of the biggest challenges in town: looking after abandoned dogs. Dogs attach to pilgrims while they walk to town and they don’t take them back with them. Every year, dozens of new dogs arrive in Chalma and the local population doesn’t have the capacity to shelter all of them. One of the main tasks of the community center is to recover the history, culture, and traditions of Chalma through proper and systematic documentation (taking photographs, drone videos, and interviews as well as organizing the international folklore festival in its fifth edition in 2023).