SECreTour
SECreTour drives sustainable cultural tourism by empowering local communities, shaping a Fair, Creative, and Sustainable Tourism approach, and testing diverse European pilot cases to foster fair development, community engagement, and policy insights. SECreTour is a transformative project focused on harnessing cultural tourism for sustainable development. Prioritizing local communities, the initiative views tourism as a tool to diversify income, recognize rural areas, and promote services beyond cultural offerings. Through the Fair, Creative, and Sustainable Tourism (FaCS-Tourism) approach developed with Heritage Communities, SECreTour aims to avoid touristification, engage citizens in governance, and test ideas in diverse European pilot cases, spanning rural landscapes to places of historical significance. The project envisions a future where cultural tourism not only drives fair and sustainable development but also fosters community resilience and ownership, providing valuable insights and policy recommendations for the broader cultural heritage and tourism landscape.
Title:
Sustainable, Engaging and CREative TOURism as a driver for a better future in rural and remote areas
Funded by:
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Research Executive Agency (REA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
Start – end:
January 2024 - December 2026
Value:
2,9M EUR
about
the project
Project acronym: SECreTour
Tourism is more than travelling and consuming and it has a great potential for sustainable development when it focuses on culture, nature, knowledge, and experiences. Creative Cultural Tourism can be used as a driver for innovation and cooperation and, to counteract its negative impacts, SECreTour will primarily focus on the local communities’ needs, perceptions and expectations. Tourism will be conceived as a tool to complement and diversify the income of the territories and communities, but also as a way of giving visibility and recognition to rural areas and their inhabitants, also promoting the installation and generation of services other than cultural.
By developing a Fair, Creative and Sustainable Tourism (FaCS-Tourism) approach together with Heritage Communities (HC), the SECreTour consortium will assess the sensitivities and affordances of different local realities, needs and types of cultural heritage, visualizing and avoiding touristification and promoting alternative business models. FaCS-Tourism and HC will therefore enable governance and citizen engagement not only for touristic-economic planning, but also for community building and cultural heritage management and protection.
Objectives:
- The SECreTour project aims to foster sustainable development and social cohesion in rural and remote areas through cultural tourism.
- The project will develop new business models and policy recommendations for sustainable cultural tourism.
- The project will also promote an inclusive and sustainable cultural and creative tourism to the widest possible range of actors.
Partners:
- Universidad de Granada, Spain (Lead Partner)
- Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
- Promoter S.r.l, Italy
- Bibracte, France
- Center of Research and Promotion of Historical-Archaeological Albanian Landscapes, Albania
- Eachtra Archaeological Projects Ltd., Ireland
- ARCTUR, Slovenia
- Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary
- Matej Bel University, Slovakia
- Università della Svizzera Italiana, Switzerland
- Zavod Id20, Slovenia
