Toural Project!
Press Release
New tourism models for the sustainable development of rural & remote areas
EU’s rural remote areas demonstrate a wide range of qualities, while facing unique challenges. A major challenge is the diversification of economic activities beyond the traditional agriculture-farming-forestry sectors, as enablers for stimulating economic growth. Evidently, tourism could become an anchor for the economic development of rural and remote areas. A new just approved EU funded project is going to address these types of challenges in the next 3 years.
Motivated by the above considerations, TOURAL focuses on cultural & creative tourism as drivers for sustainable development, paying at the same time a premium to the EU Tourism Transition Pathway requirements, within the context of smart multi-destination and multi-dimensional tourism offerings empowered by macro-regional tourism cooperation. TOURAL proposes a model to support the touristic development of participating rural regions, balancing the growth of their urban clusters with the untapped growth potential of their remote and rural cells.
The project’s approach is multi-dimensional in terms of addressing complementary tourism verticals/niche sectors (underwater cultural & nature heritage tourism, cultural & creative tourism, cultural science tourism, silver tourism); participatory in terms of co-designing policy pathways and tourism offerings/services, co-creating business models and tourism products, and co-validating small-scale tourism services implementations; and integrated in terms of joint planning and business development with integrated value-chains, policymaking and cross-border cooperation, at macro-regions level. The scope of foreseen interventions includes 3 regions from the Adriatic-Ionian macro-region (Italy, Croatia, Greece), and 3 regions from the Black Sea Basin (Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine).
TOURAL will develop multidimensional models of tourism verticals driving the sustainable balanced growth among rural & remote grids and urban clusters of rural regions fostering macro-regional cooperation. The project is implemented in the framework of Horizon Europe Programme, while its total budget (funded by the European Union) amounts to 2.999.927€. Its duration is 36 months and consists of 20 partners coming from Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Italy, Croatia, Albania, France, Türkiye and Ukraine.
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