What you find in this news
Lesvos, Ancona, Faro: coastal areas and overtourism
Within the tourism industry, coastal tourism is absolutely the most important in terms of tourist flows and as a source of income generation. Among tourist destinations, coastal areas are those ones preferred by tourists, and the Mediterranean region is the most important tourist destination in the world: according to estimates by the World Tourism Organisation, it accounts for one third of the total tourism revenues.
But what does this mean for our coastlines, and beaches, and people who are living there?
Seaside towns are struggling with a lot of difficulties connected to overtourism, such as seasonality of employment, worsening quality of local communities life, gentrification, land consumption caused by the development of an unique tourism model. In this situation, climate change that affects coastal areas – sand erosion, the loss of coral reefs, a plunge in marine life, algae blooms, and beached animals – amplifies the environmental impacts of overtourism. Although climate change is a primary cause, overtourism is no friend to the fragile ecosystem either and the convergence of two phenomena has enhanced the complexities of seeking solutions.
Local communities and art to tackle overtourism and voluntourism
Sineglossa has a long experience on how activities, projects, and methodologies can promote regeneration of key sites. Nontourism is our best practice on requalification of so called marginal areas: its innovative element is the involvement of local communities through artistic outputs and the production of a “nontouristic guide” written by inhabitants.
Starting from this know how, what we are going to do through the Bluetour upcoming project is collaborating with other local organizations – like LATRA Innovation Lab (Lesvos) and Municipality of Faro (Portugal) – to design a new methodology specifically addressed to coastal areas.
Faro, Ancona, Lesvos, are territories undergoing social, environmental and urbanistic transformations, due to overtourism and voluntourism. The goal of Bluetour is to help these places redefine their identity by involving the inhabitants in a process of recovering of memories of the past, raising of awareness on opportunities and problems of the present, foreseeing of possible future scenarios. Like a sort of “post-Anthropocene” approach.
The final output of the multiple Bluetour activities will be implemented are community based artworks dedicated to experiencing the blue heritage both by local community and non-tourists, those who do not travel to collect postcards but to discover the authentic spirit of a territory. To contribute to the environmental protection and cultural tourism development of coastal areas, Blue Tour will act on two interconnected fronts: enabling artists and cultural professionals to engage local communities in a participatory process and producing, collectively, new narratives of each place involved by the consortium (Ancona, Faro, Lesvos).
Bluetour project, what we’ll do
To achieve both goals of training of cultural workers and the involvement of local communities, the project will organise:
- three local and one transnational focus group to codesign Bluetour methodology, a resource that will be used in a capacity building activity in Ancona for training artists and cultural practitioners coming from Ancona, Faro, Lesvos
- an open call at national level for selecting three main artists that will co-create community based artworks with local people to promote new visions of coastal areas towards slow tourists
- transnational artistic residencies where three artists meeting local communities and sharing artistic outputs
- a national meeting to share the Bluetour methodology with creative cultural sector
- three national training sessions with a peer to peer training designed by Sineglossa for 15 artists
- a final international conference to spread Bluetour results and methodology
Bluetour project, who we are
Blue Tour is a project led by Sineglossa, in collaboration with Latra innovation Lab (Greece), Municipio de Faro (Portugal), in association with Iliaktida (Greece), Universidade do Algarve (Portugal), Região de Turismo do Algarve (Portugal). The project is co-funded by the European Union within the Creative Europe programme.
