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Make Kota Tua heritage trail accessible
Setting up a heritage trail to better connect its old town and promoting it online would be the logical first step toward realizing Jakarta’s full heritage tourism potential.
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A visit to Kota Tua is not complete without jumping on the city’s famous colorful bikes. (Shutterstock.com/Distinctive Shots)
J
akarta is an exciting metropolis. As a destination, it mostly attracts exhibition and conference visitors, and shoppers who revel in its countless malls. What visitors often overlook is Jakarta’s rich cultural heritage and history, which goes back beyond the Dutch colonial era.
Making more of its old town, Kota Tua, arguably its most important heritage tourism asset, will be key to changing this. Heritage tourism has become a major source of income for many cities around the world and is rapidly gaining in economic importance. Setting up a heritage trail to better connect its old town and promoting it online would be the logical first step toward realizing Jakarta’s full heritage tourism potential.
If you have spent a couple of days in Jakarta as a tourist or business traveler, you might have been to Fatahillah Square, the centerpiece of Old Batavia in West Jakarta. The chance that you have visited the area around Sunda Kelapa, the city’s old port in North Jakarta, is much slimmer.
Sunda Kelapa receives 80 percent less visitors than Fatahillah Square, despite being only a short walk away. The main reason is that, if you are walking around Fatahillah Square, you will likely be unaware that the old town extends all the way to Sunda Kelapa. Even if you have read about it in a guidebook, you will find it difficult to get there without taking a taxi, because it is cut off from the rest of Kota Tua by a railway line and the inner ring road.
The pedestrian-unfriendly design of the space between the two sites makes walking difficult, if no clear directions are given. As a result, most visitors skip the northern part of Kota Tua, which is not only home to the old port and the maritime museum, but also to the historic Luar Batang Mosque.
Unless the two areas are properly connected, Jakarta and especially North Jakarta will miss out on an important economic development opportunity. The fact that the two areas are also divided by an administrative border poses an additional challenge for integrated urban development, but the longterm ambition must be to bring the two parts together in one attractive and walkable urban space.
The logical first step toward this goal is to set up a heritage trail guiding visitors from Fatahillah Square to Sunda Kelapa along a series of interesting historic and cultural sites. These could include the former Heerenstraat, the historic warehouses (Graanpakhuizen) and Kampong Tongkol.
