• Cultural diversity in the area is represented by black communities, Embera-Wounaan indigenous communities, and mixed individuals. All of these communities have become fairly socially organized per their ancestral relation with the territory and their cultural practices that, in turn, helped preserve their ecosystems. For these communities, the territory is “life’s space for life”, constituted by physical elements as rivers, mountains, lagoons or hills, as by knowledge to protect and preserve. These communities view biodiversity as the sum of territory and culture, with their preservation being determined and oriented in favour of their rights.

Indigenous communities are strictly rural, maintaining many of their productive customs –seeing as their economy is based on subsistence activities-, as well as their social and cultural traditions with a pattern of disperse settlements, with solidarity and reciprocity for productive processes, free access to means of production, and an understanding of the land as collective heritage.

Large families brought together by camaraderie are characteristic of the black community. This suggests the desire for support, aid and trust (Fundacion Cenipacifico, 1998.) The preservation of the riverside environments, the lagoons and the bay, where traditional artisanal fishing takes place, as well as of the mud-flats from where the piangua is extracted, has a direct and reciprocal influence on the protection of these communities who have developed a series of practices of usage/relation with the natural offer, adapting to its ecological, meteorological and oceanographic cycles, which has earned these communities the label of adaptive.

The Community and Institutional Collectivity for the Protection of Natural and Cultural Values of Bahia Malaga, composed of the different social and institutional actors of the region, is an organization created to identify and apply different strategies for the preservation of biodiversity and ethnical diversity in Bahia Malaga.