With suitable equipment, a trail technician can finish a field outing with a report ready for interpretation and avoid hours of later office work. The system behind that process was presented at Saturday’s technical session in Teror, Gran Canaria, during the XXXII Jornadas Nacionales de Senderos y Senderismo.
Miguel Morales, FECAMON’s trails representative and the conference organiser, developed the inventory with Francisco Corredera, a topographical engineer. Their research and development project combines GIS with artificial intelligence to certify fieldwork quickly and reliably. Morales and Corredera described it as «un campo de trabajo del que es muy difícil ver el horizonte» (“a field of work whose horizon is very difficult to see”, translated from Spanish).
The organisers also presented figures showing the scale of trail work in the Canary Islands. The regional federation has approved or reviewed more than 300 kilometres in recent years, nearly 250 kilometres of them on Gran Canaria. It ranks among the country’s three or four leading federations for licences per 1,000 residents.
One island-wide initiative, «Caminando por Canarias», links all seven islands through routes designed as “itinerant classrooms”. Vicente Hernández, FECAMON’s hiking representative, reported 32 stages covering 597 kilometres and reaching 76 of the archipelago’s 88 municipalities. The programme recorded 556 participations and an overall rating of 9.6 out of 10.
Two other presentations focused on specific projects. Reynaldo Ramos of public company GESPLAN outlined the rehabilitation and signposting of the GR-138 and GR-139 routes on Gran Canaria, former trade and transport paths whose history includes the role of women. Manuel Cabezudo of Fundación Atlas presented «Contramapas», a cultural programme linked to the GC-131 trail and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria’s bid to become European Capital of Culture 2031.
In the afternoon, representatives of regional federations met as the Comité Estatal de Senderos y Senderismo to share work on the trail network. The organisers said the conference programme was due to close on Sunday 15 with a walk in the Osorio area and a visit to Teror’s market.
