SECreTour - Sustainable, Engaging and CREative Tourism as a driver for a better future in rural and remote areas

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.
Through a series of pilot cases, the project will demonstrate how cultural heritage can be used as a real driver for sustainable and fair development, promoting at the same time its conservation. Pilots have been carefully chosen to represent a full range of European territories, communities and heritage, including not only rural and agrarian landscapes, but also memory places of local identities, minorities, conflictive dark heritage. Pilots will be a focus for every part of the research as they will enable to test general ideas and observations in local detail and in specific governance contexts, and to facilitate effective communication, cooperation and problem-solving through an interdisciplinary and trans-sectoral approach.