Following the virtual kick-off meeting that took place in January, Balkan Heritage Foundation had the pleasure of attending the TOURAL project physical kick-off meeting. This was held on 23 – 24 February, 2024 in Thessaloniki, Greece at the Centre for Research & Technology Hellas (CERTH), with 19 of 20 partners attending in person.

The first day of this meeting was dedicated to project partners’ presentation and introduction to WP1 (Management) and WP2 (Cultural & Creative Tourism/CCT Analysis & Policy Pathways) activities. On the second day, the partners gave a detailed presentation on the technical WPs and the project’s pilot sites (North Sporades- Greece, Teramo Province-Italy, Island of Pag / Village Šimuni-Croatia, Nessebar-Bulgaria, Danube Delta LAG-Tulcea, Romania, Kutsurub-Ukraine) which include three areas from the Adriatic-Ionian macro-region, and three regions from the Black Sea Basin.

As part of our commitment to preserving cultural heritage and fostering public awareness, we are overjoyed to be part of this project: TOURAL aims to promote sustainable cultural tourism in rural areas, which are often overlooked by tourism policies despite the wealth of cultural heritage they hold. Like other partners on this project, we look forward to being able to use our experience in heritage management to help rural communities by raising awareness of the incredible cultural riches that they have to offer to the tourism industry, and the many benefits that sustainable tourism can bring to these areas.
We look forward to sharing future updates and developments with you as we work with local communities to ensure that they become the protagonists in their cultural heritage tourism projects. An exciting journey for the development of a model to support the sustainable touristic development of rural regions has just begun!

The project is funded by the European Union in Horizon 2023 Framework Programme.