TExTOUR is inspired by the motto “Our heritage: where the past meets the futureâ€, used by the EU to celebrate 2018 as the EYCH, with the aim of encouraging a wider audience to discover and commit to European CH, thus strengthening membership in a legacy and a common cultural space. But this discovery of heritage, is not only raised in TExTOUR viewing the tourist as an end user, but it focuses on the implementation of collaborative work methodologies that share the knowledge and needs of all stakeholders in the territory directly and indirectly involved in the Cultural tourism development.
TExTOUR brings together 18 EU partners and beyond, represented in the quintuple social innovation helix (knowledge, business, society, government and entrepreneurs) to be able to design, validate and upscaling to various levels, policies and practices with positive impact on the socio-economic territorial development based on sustainable cultural tourism. A total of 9 partners represent 7 classified cultural tourism pilots (natural, cultural, industrial, ethnic minorities, UNESCO site…) that, together with the creation of CT-labs represented in each of them by a network of key stakeholders, will provide key information for the bottom-up design of a Valorisation Strategy, Investment Strategy and TExTOUR Tool for decision making.
Today, culture has become an important catalyst for tourism, and this is supported by UNWTO, which estimates that cultural tourism represents about 37% of the total tourism sector, with an annual growth of around 15%. This growth not only depends exclusively on the existence of historical-artistic heritage, but also is related to other synergistic factors such as training, the use of ICTs, gastronomy, identity, local culture, values, intangible heritage or other singularities that make a corner the most singular place of the world for the new tourist. Using these premises, TExTOUR will take advantage of the potential of poorly known regions and sites, identifying key local community groups, and implement innovative strategies and policies for their activation and promotion, using the developed TExTOUR tool.