A

parade of some 150 onthel (old bicycles) and a lion dance performance on Friday afternoon marked the opening of the Ampenan Old Town Festival on Ampenan Beach in Mataram, West Nusa Tenggara (NTB).

Held through Sunday, the festival aimed to promote Ampenan’s Old Town as one of the city’s top tourist destinations. The event is part of a Lombok Sumbawa cultural month held until Sept. 16.

“Through this festival, we also want to continue pushing and promoting the Ampenan Old Town area as an arena of cultural preservation and development in NTB,” the province’s tourism agency secretary Endah Setyo Rini said during the festival’s official opening on Friday.

The festival also featured several events that highlighted the results of acculturation in Mataram, including a Lombok coffee festival, a cross-ethnic parade, a food and fashion festival, a photo exhibition of old Ampenan, a Sampan racing, a Peresean exhibition and a Sasak puppet performance.

“The acculturation of various ethnicities in Ampenan is very beautiful,” said Endah, adding that Ampenan was home to people from various ethnic backgrounds, such as the Sasak Lombok tribe, as well as Balinese, Chinese and Arabic.

The festival also exhibited the traditional dishes of these cultures.

Ampenan’s Old Town was the main seaport and central business district for Lombok during the Dutch colonial era. A number of buildings constructed during that time still remain and are being used by small and medium
enterprises.

Mataram City Legislative Council Speaker Didi Sumardi praised the city administration’s decision to declare Ampenan as a special cultural preservation area and a tourist destination.

Ampenan is popular for its beaches, but the festival highlights its rich cultural history, he added.

“The Barongsai performance is an example. It shows the diverse ethnicities in Ampenan, living together peacefully for years,” he said.

Didi said the council and the city administration had been preparing a bylaw to regulate the development of the Ampenan Old Town area.

The bylaw would provide a legal umbrella for the administration to revitalize Ampenan, a roadmap of the preservation plan, an environmentally friendly development concept and its spatial planning as a tourist destination.

He said that the bylaw is crucial to prevent the Old Tow from being developed in ways that could distort its historical legacies.

“The bylaw will also protect the preservation of historical buildings and cultural legacies, so the slogan ‘Our culture is our pride’ can be maintained especially for the younger generation,” Didi said.