The final SECreTour Conference will be held in the University of Granada on the 19th and 20th of November 2026.
FACS* Tourism - *Fair, Creative and Sustainable Tourism
Using tourism as a tool for rural and remote areas development in a European context.
The programme for the conference can be downloaded here. What still surprises me about EU-funded projects like this is that not everything is sewn up, even near the end. Ideas we started with are still being tested against ones that took shape more recently, and this conference is part of how we bring it all together.
To attend in person please register here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScsHAeDHZ5ttNuALVHOHVYXU92brGnXqUPIU_sPeAatIsABAQ/viewform
FACS* Tourism (*Fair, Creative and Sustainable Tourism), the final international conference of the EU-funded SECreTour project, takes place on 19–20 November 2026 at the Instituto Universitario de la Paz y los Conflictos, Universidad de Granada, hosted by MEMOLab UGR. Researchers, heritage practitioners and policymakers will explore how tourism can help keep Europe’s rural and remote communities alive, rather than simply passing through them.
After a welcome from Vice-Rector Esteban Romero Frías and SECreTour coordinator José María Martín Civantos, Francisco J. Liébana Cabanillas (Universidad de Granada) sets out the economic context of rural tourism. Esteban Ruiz Ballesteros (Universidad Pablo de Olavide) examines community-based tourism and the rural crisis, and Esben Rahbek Gjerdrum Pedersen and Helena Løkkegaard (Copenhagen Business School) look at cultural business models. Day two brings Jesús Fernández Fernández (La Ponte-Ecomuséu, Asturias) on responsible tourism in peasant-shaped landscapes and Nancy Duxbury (University of Coimbra) on regenerative, place-based culture-tourism. Francesca Cominelli (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) and Vincent Guichard (Grand Site de France) address policy and the sustainable management of rural areas. Ana Llano (Spanish Ecotourism Association) speaks on ecotourism, and Ignacio Muñiz Jaén and Francisco Vicente Jurado present the Caicena River Ecomuseum in Almedinilla. A Cultural Tourism Cluster session with sibling projects CULTURALITY, CROCUS and TOURAL works towards shared policy recommendations, and the conference ends with a joint closing statement.
SECreTour (Sustainable, Engaging and Creative Tourism as a driver for a better future in rural and remote areas) is a three-year Horizon Europe project, begun in March 2024, focused on cultural tourism on Europe’s peripheries. It treats tourism as a way to diversify local incomes, give rural places recognition and support services for residents and visitors alike, with community needs first. Working with heritage communities, it tests approaches that avoid touristification, back alternative business models and involve citizens in caring for their heritage. Its pilot sites, from agrarian landscapes to places of memory, minority identity and “dark” heritage, show how heritage can drive fair, sustainable development while being conserved.
