SECreTOUR- Sustainable, Engaging and creative tourism as a driver for a better future in rural and remote areas.

Project Summary

SECreTour perceives tourism as a tool to complement and diversify local income, while also increasing the visibility and recognition of rural areas and their inhabitants. It also serves as a means to encourage the establishment of services that benefit both local communities and visitors. By fostering a fair, creative and sustainable tourism approach in collaboration with heritage communities, the SECreTour will assess different local contexts, needs, and types of cultural heritage. Specific goals are taken into account by the project while testing and experimenting new forms of tourism development, namely: to avoid touristification, to promote alternative business models, to enable governance and citizen engagement not only for touristic-economic planning, but also for community building and cultural heritage management and protection.
Through a series of 8 pilot cases, the project aims to demonstrate how cultural heritage can be used as a real driver for sustainable and fair development, promoting at the same time its conservation. Pilots have been carefully chosen to represent a full range of European territories, communities and heritage, including not only rural and agrarian landscapes, but also memory places of local identities, minorities, conflictive dark heritage. https://secretourproject.eu

CeRPHAAL’s role in the project

CeRPHAAL leads the Upper Vjosa Valley research pilot area (#3), focusing on the heritage of the Vlach minority. Its aim is to study, preserve, and promote the endangered tangible and intangible heritage of this minority group. By adopting a ground-up approach, the project in the pilot intends to highlight lost ways of life, local knowledge and practice tied to Vlachs’ past, while offering opportunities for an unknown historical narrative of a territory and its people to be broadly communicated and explored.