Villages and towns in the area carry names like Mucuchíes, Mucubají or Mucurubá, and as a trademark, the future guest houses to be opened in pilot projects in southeastern Venezuela and on the border between Argentina and Bolivia will also be called ”mucuposadas”.

”We have had tourists staying with us for 22 days straight. It's a major boost to our income,” says Iris Rondón as she kneads the dough to make ”arepa”, Venezuela's typical flat, round bread which is usually made with corn flour, but at these altitudes is made with wheat flour.

”The garlic harvest wasn't good this year, but we can get back on our feet with the visitors,” she adds, in the mucuposada Agüita Azul.

Juan Carlos Quintero, who grows crops on three of his 10 hectares -- the rest is wild moor landscape covered by native species of flora -- opened, with his mother Rosa, the mucuposada Nido del Gavilán, 3,358 metres above sea level.

”Our income is more or less 50 percent from the inn and 50 percent from farming,” he tells IPS.

The tropical Andes mountains are among the most biologically rich areas on the planet, home to 45,000 species of plants, 44 percent of which are endemic, and 3,389 species of vertebrates (not counting fish), 46 percent of which are endemic.

Various wild species of vegetables, like potatoes and maize, as well as several kinds of fruit also grow in the tropical highlands.

But the area is facing the environmental depredation that tends to accompany the expansion of the agricultural frontier. The summits of Mérida, where the country's highest mountain, Pico Bolívar (4,987 metres), is located, show signs of that phenomenon.

In Venezuela's Andean highlands, for example, the introduction of varieties of sun-grown coffee is destroying the mountainside forests that protected Arabica coffee plants, which are traditionally grown in the shade.

”We decided to work with the communities that have the greatest impact on the forests and stands of trees in the highlands, which were once the site of glaciers that have now shrunk to a few lakes and wetland areas that are the source of springs and rivers that flow into the (giant) Orinoco River and Lake Maracaibo,” Lesenfants explains in an interview.

This country of 25 million is one of the Latin American nations with the broadest formal protection of its jungles, lowland plains and mountains.

A total of 40 national parks cover 16 percent of the 916,445-sq-km territory, including the 2,000-sq-km La Culata Park in the highlands and the 2,700-sq-km Sierra Nevada Park, which are mainly located in the state of Mérida.

”However, we didn't want to come to the local campesinos with barbed wire, but with a project to transform the view of the stunning scenery of the parks into working capital,” says William Aular, another environmentalist with the Tropical Andes Programme.

”If there are no jobs or opportunities, the young campesinos migrate to the cities or occupy the national parks and create pastureland for their sheep and cattle to graze,” he adds.

Irene Sánchez is a true believer in the cause: ”If we occupy or destroy the park, rivers and groves, then we won't have anything to show the tourists and we won't have any income,” she says. ”Besides, we women now have a company in our hands, we don't only work in agriculture anymore, and if we work together we can do okay.”

A total of 140 innkeepers and local guides offer their services in the network of 11 ”mucuposadas” to ensure guests a comfortable, hospitable stay and to provide guided tours and hikes along 22 different trails in the mountains to enjoy the varied ecosystems, which include wild-flower covered hills.

The Association of Guides and Innkeepers -- some of whom own a guest house, while others just have a couple of mules and endless stories to tell -- is connected through a radio network, and has standardised a list of specific services, like hot water and typical dishes, as well as fees: an overnight stay including three meals costs 15 dollars per person.

”Now we love our highlands even more. They're really pretty,” says another local campesino, Rómulo Rangel, in the main room of his Michicabá guest house in Gavidia, a 300-year-old village that half a century ago ended up within the bounds of the Sierra Nevada Park.

A road finally reached the village 17 years ago, and the residents have had electricity for just 13 years.

Rangel and his wife Rosalía sit and chat in the evening with their guests, serving grilled trout from the Gavidia cooperative that farms the fish.

”Our income has improved, and we will now be able to send our children to study in Mucuchíes,” the nearest town, he explains.

Six tourists staying overnight at the guest house, eating three meals a day and taking a horseback ride, generate the same income brought in by 14 50-kg sacks of potatoes, or the yield of one-tenth of a hectare farmed for six months.

”Our work with the communities is not carried out at random,” says Lesenfants. ”We have worked in critical areas, where the forests and moors are facing the greatest threats, and we select the campesinos to be involved in the programme based on their location, their management abilities, and the convenience of reassessing the value of the park as working capital,” he adds.

The Tropical Andes Programme has received 1.1 million dollars in financing from the European Union, and another 300,000 dollars from the Spanish non-governmental organisation CODESPA and the Andean Development Corporation, along with self-generated income from the programme's Andean mapping services based on satellite images.

A large part of the funds have gone towards financing the remodelling of campesino homes, to fit them out as guest houses, and to loans for purchasing horses and work materials, which are paid back into a rotating fund.

The project's success has encouraged the state-run company Edelca, which administers the Guri hydropower dam in southeastern Venezuela along the border with Brazil, to promote the creation of mucuposadas among Pemón indigenous communities, as part of eco-tourism projects that capitalise on the natural beauty of the Guayana region.

The Guayana region is home to the Gran Sabana (Great Savannah), where more than 100 tepuis (Pemón for ”mountain”) are located. The tepuis are flat-topped mountains that are among the most unique habitats on earth, because the plant species have evolved in total isolation.

The programme has also awakened the interest of the company operating another dam, in Yacambú, in central-western Venezuela.

To share their experiences, Edelca and the Tropical Andes Programme took campesinos from the Andean highlands to the Guayana savannah to meet people from the Pemón indigenous community.

It was the first time Sánchez had left her remote highland region -- not to mention her first time on an airplane. ”The Pemón are simple people like us. We understood each other easily,” she recalls.

In the northwestern Argentine province of Salta and in Tarija in southern Bolivia there are plans to reproduce the experience of the mucuposadas to take advantage of the wetlands that serve as refuge to flamingos and other species, and the Yungas, the southernmost forests of the tropical Andes, in community-based eco-tourism ventures along the Bermejo River.

If the pilot rural tourism projects prosper in the cloud forests of that highlands region, the ”mucu” root of the language of the extinct Timotocuicas will have been exported from Venezuela, along with the motto of the programme's enterprising organisers: ”preserve by improving people's lives.”