Geopark face-lift

Fengkai National Geopark in Guangdong Province is now undergoing a process of infrastructure construction and face-lift for its official opening to the public this October.

Entering the list of national geoparks last year, the only such geopark in the Xijiang River valley in South China is making strenuous efforts to improve its tourism facilities and services to create an excellent environment for the sustainable development of eco-tourism.

A theme limestone cave inside the park, the first of its kind in China, has been developed to give tourists an exciting experience.

Infrastructure construction including a geo-museum, signboards for sightseeing, entertainment centres, a shopping centre, leisure squares, and parking lots broke ground in February and will be completed by October.

According to local authorities, the park is bound to be an attractive tourist destination given that it will launch special travel routes combining local unique landscape, architecture and cuisine.

Underground minepark to be built

Authorities of Pengqian Minepark in the city of Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, plan to build an underground minepark inside the park after it was ranked first in the national mineparks evaluation conference late last year.

Sources from the park said 7,600 metre-long mining caves, capable of serving about 150,000 tourists, have recently been excavated within the park.

Experts believe these caves will add new attraction to the minepark.

Fenghuang Mountain Minepark, another minepark in Shenzhen, is expected to highlight its outdoor mining landscape richly loaded with cultural features, which will offer travellers both wonderful sights and mining knowledge.

Feasible guideline

Tianjin Geological Environmental Monitoring Centre recently released an authoritative and feasible guideline for the healthy development of Jixian County National Geopark based on relevant research and field studies of the park.

The centre repositioned and re-examined the park, adding one new scenic spot and 20 geological relic sites. Besides, the authority divided the relic sites of the park into 10 categories and 28 subcategories in terms of their distribution and causes of formation. The 10 categories include the stratum, tectonic relics, rocky relics, mineral relics and fossil relics, as well as geological action relics, geomorphic relics, geological disaster relics and human activity relics.

(China Daily 03/17/2006 page6)