There can be few more symbolic locations to hold a project meeting related to EuroVelo 13 – Iron Curtain Trail then Gdańsk – home of the Solidarity (Solidarność) movement, which played such a key role in bringing down the iron curtain.
President of European Cultural Tourism Network (ECTN), Mr Raitis Sijats (who is also VTA's Chairman of the Board), addressed the Cultural Routes of the Council of Europe Forum, which took place at the Radisson Blu Hotel Lietuva from 26 – 27 October 2016 in Vilnius, Lithuania. This year`s forum focused on ‘Expanding the Cultural Routes of the Council of Europe: challenges and opportunities’.
On Saturday 15th October representatives of the National EuroVelo Coordination Centres and Coordinators’ (NECC/Cs) met in Vienna to present best practices, exchange experiences and agree how to continue the successful development of EuroVelo across the continent.
The first exchange of experience process started with capitalization of good practices related to one of the priority theme ‘Intangible Heritage Tourism’ on 22 – 24 September 2016 in Guimaraes, Portugal, at the ‘Platform for Arts and Creativity’ centre, linked to the European Heritage Days and European Cooperation Day.
During the last days of August, the Latvian city of Liepāja welcomed representatives of the transnational consortium working on the Iron Curtain Train Experience (ICTE) project. Despite not being located on the border of two countries split by the ‘Iron Curtain’, this section of the route contains lots of reminders of the Cold War period and how Europe was once divided into East and West, as the participants in the project meeting found out.
Project CHRISTA Inauguration was started by 1st Interregional Steering Committee Meeting which took place in Thessaloniki, Greece on 23 – 24 May 2016.
At this meeting the project partners were introduced to each other, presented their regions and cultural assets and discussed the four selected good practices as well as the roles and tasks of the project and its partners.
The Silver Cyclists project reached the half way point in the month of April with a second project meeting. Hosted by the Spanish Railways Foundation in Madrid on April 7th-8th, partners from 7 different European countries attended this fruitful meeting in order to monitor the project implementation. The meeting focused on the work developed so far with a special look into the next steps.
