Living human treasures

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Project “Living human treasures” focuses on the cross-border challenge to valorize the preserved authentic culture in the cross-border region of districts Montana, Vidin and Dolj county for the creation of tourism products and development of cultural tourism. It builds upon the results achieved by project “Valorisation of authentic culture for cross-border tourism” ROBG-13, implemented under call 1 of INTERREG V-A program to create 2 new integrated tourist products and facilitate tour-operators and individual tourists to organize tourism visits in the cross-border region following coordinated organized cultural happenings. The overall objective of the project is to promote local authentic culture in the field of authentic dances, singing and typical culinary and through organization and coordination of culture events to provide professional tourism offer ready for sale from touroperators and use of individual tourists. Our project will establish 3 cross-border traveling folklore festivals in the 3 districts, organize a nationwide cross-border fair for authentic folklore and coordinate a continuous offer of local stakeholders, shaped in the form of cross-border tourism products that will attract at least 2000 tourists in the region for trips over 1 day! The program outputs our living human treasures will contribute to are: - Establishment of a joint cross-border management plan for continuous valorization of cultural tourism, resulting in the design and coordination of numerous weekend or holiday cultural events along a touristic itinerary and transmitting these offers directly to touroperators for development of “ready for use” tourism products. - Creation of 2 new integrated tourist products: organization of 3 6-days traveling festivals of authentic culture and a Nationwide cross-border fair for authentic folklore; - We expect our project to result in encouragement of 2000 overnights in the target region within project implementation resulting directly from the activities in the project. The approach of the project focuses on the creation and coordination of continuous cross-border cultural tourism offer and its dissemination to touroperators for the encouragement of cross-border cultural tourism in the target region. The project will turn the existing living human treasures in the target cross-border area into revenue generating human treasures by performing their folklore and culinary skills through the following activities: A1: Selection of participants – all project beneficiaries have thorough knowledge about the folklore performers and typical culinary masters in the region within this activity they will select the participants, trying to provide opportunity to all performers and groups with potential to take part in the project events and to include their coordinated happenings in the joint cross-border management plan for continuous valorization of cultural tourism. A2: Joint cross-border management plan for valorization of authentic culture – based on the lessons learned so far, project beneficiaries will develop this tool in order to design and coordinate various weekend or holiday cultural events along a touristic itinerary and transmit these offers directly to touroperators for development of “ready for use” tourism products. There will be at least 12 cross-border cultural offers, designed along different routes and on different thematic fields. Invitations to touroperators to organize touristic groups will be sent for each of the offers with the described performances along the routes. The routes will start from Romania or Bulgaria and will have strong cross-border impact! Project team will visit all performances and assist the performers in selling their products. A3: Cross-border trainings for dancing, singing and cooking – within this activity 3 cross-border trainings for 45 participants will be organized in districts Vidin, Montana and Dolj county lasting 4 days each to train the living treasures in dances, songs or culinary, typical for the different places in the region and thus be able to include in their performances something well-known for the guests from the cross-border region. For example one of the performances of a Bulgarian dance group could be “Sarba” in order to surprise the Romanian tourists. A4: Traveling festivals of authentic culture – 3 cross-border festivals will be organized in each of the districts, spending a day in 5 different localities with 100 guest performers from the other 2 districts and 50 local performers from the different localities. For this purpose a mobile scene and professional sound system will be purchased to enable the organizers to achieve sustainability of the project. The event will be promoted to attract many visitors. A5: Presentation at 2 tourism fairs – the tourism products created within the project and all promotional materials for living human treasures will be promoted at the biggest tourism fairs in Sofia and Bucurest to raise awareness and encourage the tourism flow towards the target area. 6 performers will be invited to demonstrate live their skills and abilities. A6: Nationwide cross-border fair for authentic folklore – a 3 days event with 150 cross-border performers will be organized in Belogradchik. The trained "talents" of authentic culture in 20 tents will teach the citizens and guests of authentic dances, songs and recipes, allowing tourists to participate and learn. The fair will be well promoted and will be the key event in the project. A7: Promotional campaign – within this activity will be developed a 60 minute video book of Authentic culture containing songs, dances and recipes; catalogue with pictures, text and music of the songs, the explanation of the dances and the recipes from the trainings; 2 press-conferences in each district; at least 38 press-releases, sent to journalists and touroperators before and after each event and each coordinated tourist route with cultural happenings; promotional materials such as t-shirts, caps, diplomas, etc. A8: Project management – 8 team meetings will be held in both countries to synchronise the efforts of project beneficiaries in order to implement activities most efficiently and achieve maximum results. The project is innovative with the travelling festivals and the idea to support tour-operators with ready-for-use cultural offers along different routes in the cbc area in order to create a strong tourism flow towards the target region, thus developing cultural tourism. Main stress is put on participation of tourists in project events and enabling different performers receive revenues from the touroperators or individual tourists for the happenings organised and coordinated within the management plan for continuous valorization of cultural tourism. The project is soft, not revenue generating. Project indicative budget is 499500euro.

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