Tourism goes beyond travel and consumption; it is a way of learning and self-improvement, of enriching vision and improving mutual understanding. This is one of the objectives of INCULTUM (Innovative Cultural Tourism in European Peripheries), a project that addresses the challenges and opportunities of cultural tourism.

The main objective of this project is to promote a positive impact, avoiding the negative effects of tourism on social relations, local cultural heritage or landscape conservation. To achieve this end, INCULTUM relies on innovative participatory approaches in which local communities and stakeholders play a direct and important role in many of the project phases, such as planning, diagnosis, decision making, implementation and evaluation. These participatory and collaborative approaches are: community-based tourism and cultural participation.

Another objective of this project is to foster sustainable social, cultural and economic development, as well as to explore the full potential of marginal and peripheral areas when managed by local communities and stakeholders. The aim is to transform local people into protagonists, which is directly related to the objectives of the RURALIZATION project.

INCULTUM and RURALIZATION have in common this goal of empowering marginal and rural areas with participatory approaches and policies that enable community-driven sustainable development. For this reason, the collaboration that both projects have just established represents a step forward in this area, and will lead to synergies and the dissemination and cross reuse of results and initiatives.

You can find more information about INCULTUM here.

If you want to know more about RURALIZATION and its sister projects, click here.