An educational experience combining technical visits and fieldwork to learn about La Palma’s water resources and the demonstration sites of the GENESIS project.
For a week, La Palma hosted the GENESIS Training Boot Camp 2026, a training programme organised as part of the project GENESIS and developed in collaboration with GeoTenerife. At AIM, we are responsible for organising and coordinating a large proportion of the activities taking place on the island, accompanying the students on a tour designed to give them a first-hand understanding of how water is managed and supplied on La Palma.
And this time, the classroom was outdoors. Over the course of those days, we toured galleries, visited water infrastructure, walked amongst banana plantations and explored some of the sites where the GENESIS demonstration projects are being carried out. On each visit, it was the very people who work with water and the land on a daily basis who helped the students understand what they were seeing.
At AIM, we coordinate visits with the various local organisations, accompany the group throughout the event and explain the work we are carrying out at the demonstration sites on La Palma. There was also time for a practical session, looking at the terrain, taking samples and exploring issues that are much easier to understand when you can see them first-hand.
Throughout the week, we were joined by the Tenisca Water Authority, the La Palma Island Water Council, CANARAGUA and the Barlovento Water Authority, as well as receiving support from LPRC for several of the activities. Each visit gave us a different perspective on water and a better understanding of the work involved in managing it on the island.
The Boot Camp also taught us something we hadn’t really expected. When explaining what we know to people starting from scratch, we realised that there were things we’d taken for granted to such an extent that it wasn’t always easy to find the right way to put them into words. Sometimes we had to stop, gather our thoughts and find another way to explain them.
During that week we taught a great deal about La Palma, but we learnt a lot too. Because knowing something and being able to explain it aren’t always the same thing, and experiences like this also help us to keep improving the way we share what we know.