CulTMed: Sustainable Cultural Tourism on the Mediterranean

ongoing

Cultural Tourism is one of the most important economic sectors for the EU and especially the Mediterannean basin. However, in order to satisfy tourists’ expectations, host communities are often threatened by loss of authenticity, commercialization, mass tourism and other negative impacts. In addition, non popular cultural destinations cannot benefit from tourism since the level of attention they receive is minimal. CulTMed, comes as a response to the challenges cultural tourism is called to face through the promotion of sustainable cultural tourism. The project's consortium comprises of 9 partners from five Mediterranean countries (Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Italy), fully committed to work towards achieving a sustainable, green transition in the EU. CulTMed is set to enhance the capacity of cultural tourism industry professionals and stakeholders and work towards forming networks of innovation through the dissemination and transfer of good practices amongst the Mediterranean region of EU. Through the Best Practices report and the creation of a Digital Library of Resources, it aspires to become the means of knowledge transfer in the filed of sustainability in cultural tourism. Through the development of four distinct curricula focusing on: (i) sustainable cultural events; (ii) sustainable tourism in acrhaeological sites; (iii) museums/galleries and sustainability; (iv) local communities and sustainable cultural tourism, CulTMed envisions to bring forward new advances in the field. Through the implementation of Living Labs, CulTMed aims to create interventions to local communities that are not considered as popular cultural tourism destinations, while through a series of events with the involvement of stakeholders and policymakers, the project aims to further promote project's results, guaranteeing that the best practices collected, taught and tested (through pilots) will further promote changes in all spectrums of the EU society