Community-led transnational cooperation project boosts local rural tourism offer
- Innovation, knowledge exchange & EIP-AGRI
- Jobs, Growth and Equality in Rural Areas
- LEADER
- Long-term Vision for Rural Areas
- Tourism
TNC partnerships help communities achieve results that they could not have achieved by working alone. The LEADER TNC project ‘Living Museums’ shows how this works in practice.
LAGs use their transnational cooperation (TNC) funds to help local communities learn from peers in different areas and countries about new ways of developing the rural economy. TNC partnerships help communities achieve results that they could not have achieved by working alone. The LEADER TNC project ‘Living Museums’ shows how this works in practice.
Spain and Czechia cooperated transnationally on the Living Museums project, which was nominated for a Rural Inspiration Award in 2022 under the Digital Futures category due to its success in advancing the benefits of digitalisation in farming and rural communities. It represents good practice as to how the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) can facilitate community-led approaches to digital service provision, the take-up of new technology and improved digital knowhow for rural communities.
Tourism services were the focus of this transnational cooperation (TNC) project, which launched a new approach to allowing visitor access to small cultural tourism facilities that could not afford to maintain full-time staff supervision. LEADER funds were invested in SMART technology to digitalise the automation of the opening, the video monitoring and the closing of museums, interpretation centres and cultural sites in rural areas.
Remote-control units, automatic locks, surveillance cameras and video recording units were all key ingredients in the success of the project. These allow visitors to connect to a dedicated online platform where they can choose the tourism buildings they want to visit and request the digital access codes for the building entrances. This technology means that the tourism centres can be open 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, thereby representing a significant boost to the rural tourism offer in the participating Local Action Group (LAG) areas.
Spanish LAGs from Castilla y León and Galicia tested the new approach in partnership with local tourism facilities in Czechia’s Central Bohemia area. The ideas and knowledge generated through this LEADER project helped to keep more than 70 small museums open, which together attracted more than 20 000 visitors between 2019 and 2022.