Murals in Watsonville encourage residents to visit parks
WATSONVILLE, Calif. (KION) A new series of murals in Pinto Lake County Park is trying to encouraging residents to visit the county parks.
The murals were painted by artist Priscilla Martinez, and the idea for the art hike challenge came to Carlos Campos, a mobilization leader with County Park Friends.
"She had these big artboards for Dia De Los Muertos and I was like, how do we expand that and bring that to other parks and have to be some type of scavenger hunt for people to go and try to find these art pieces," said Campos.
Campos says it's been a bit of a battle for south county artist to display their art publicly but wanted to give residents access to the art while getting some physical activity at the same time.
"We bring this art perspective into it and they're like, I want to go look at art plus I get to exercise a little, go for a walk so it's like a health thing as well," said Campos.
Local artist, Priscilla Martinez, hopes that this idea will expand to include other artists.
"Well, I hope that this turns out to be a bigger expansion where other artists can participate in creating murals too for the community," said Martinez.
Campos says there is a new project currently in the works that will expand to other Santa Cruz county parks.
"We call it the four mayors project so the four mayors of Santa Cruz county so Watsonville, Capitola, Santa Cruz, and Scotts Valley, they came together and they're like, 'hey, we like what you guys are doing in Pinto Lake and we want that for our city parks,'" said Campos.
KION interviewed a family who just finished finding all the murals for the art hike challenge.
"We got to see all five pieces which was really great. We almost didn't get to see the last one but we made it all the way around. It was pretty great walking around nature," said Marianna Sanchez.
Visitors can scan a QR code that provides a map for all five pieces and are encouraged to take pictures and post them online with #arthikechallenge.
