Presentation by Leonor Picão (Turism of Portugal), Sílvia Silva (Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra) and Pedro Costa (DINÂMIA'CET-ISCTE - Centre for Socioeconomic Change and Territorial Studies)

Overview

The book CREATOUR: Catalyzing creative tourism in small towns and rural areas, published by the Coimbra University Press, is the result of the work developed within the CREATOUR project, which involved five research centres and 40 organisations that conceived and implemented pilot projects of creative tourism in four regions of the country: North, Centre, Alentejo and Algarve. The CREATOUR project functioned as a research and development phase, with a view to catalysing a network of creative tourism promoters who, at local level, but simultaneously connected at national level, worked on the design, projection, testing and implementation of offers in small towns and rural areas throughout the country.

Creative tourism has shown itself to be, in small towns, a perspective and direction for cultural tourism and culture-based sustainable local development. It values and expresses what is local, vernacular and specific about a place. The small scale of the activities and their interactive character encourage experimentation, flexibility, diversification in the offer, joint learning and a creative exchange between residents and visitors. The CREATOUR project encouraged experimental practices and pilot trials aimed at a better understanding of the issues raised by creative tourism and its potential in small towns and rural areas in Portugal. Based on a cross-fertilisation of perspectives and methodologies concerning culture, tourism and local development, the project catalysed, enabled and empowered a number of bottom-up creative tourism development initiatives and approaches in the four regions covered.

This book, which has a chapter for each of the 40 pilot projects, presents the ideas and journey of each one. Each chapter deals with the progress of the journey and the organisation (or partnership) and projects inherent to it, the difficulties encountered, the successes, the balance of the journey so far and the aspirations and plans for the future. The process of preparing the chapters, written jointly by researchers and professionals from the different sectors, resulted in valuable experiences of co-learning and exchange of knowledges, giving rise to narratives that are intended to have embodied the unique flavour and specificity of each of the organisations and initiatives.

The book is available in open access at https://doi.org/10.14195/978-989-26-2183-8

An English translation of the Introduction chapter, “Activating creative tourism in small cities and rural areas in Portugal: The creatour research-andapplication approach”, can be downloaded HERE

In line with the guidelines of the project, allowing to highlight the importance of places, their richness and the specificity of each one, a presentation and discussion session will be held in each of the regions covered by the project (North, Centre, Alentejo and Algarve, with an additional session in Lisbon):

For any additional information, contact creatour@ces.uc.pt