Valencia – 19.11.21. This week was held in Jávea (Alicante) the 3rd training session and field visit of the TOURISMED PLUS project, organised by Fundación Valenciaport with the collaboration of the company Feel and Trip, the Jávea Fishermen’s Guild, Jávea Town Council and Turisme Comunitat Valenciana.
During the training session, held last Wednesday, Antonio Miragall, Councillor for the Environment, Beaches and Tourism, who opened the event, explained the City Council’s commitment to the development of new tourism products and insisted on the importance of public-private collaboration for a more sustainable tourism strategy. Next, Rosa Molins, representative of the Product and Territory Service of the Regional Ministry of Tourism, presented CREA Turisme, a tourism strategy towards ecotourism. Next, Amadeu Ros i Torres, shipowner and fisherman from the Jávea Fishermen’s Guild, presented his vision of what fishing tourism brings to both fishermen and tourists. For his part, Pepe Martínez, tour operator of Pescaturismo Spain, presented the panorama of fishing tourism in Spain and focused on how to market the experience and digitalisation. Finally, Paco Gracia and David Incertis, members of the fishing tourism company Feel and Trip, explained to the participants how to build the fishing tourism model based on the lessons learned in the previous TOURISMED project in the Valencian Community. In addition, during the working session, the TOURISMED PLUS partners started to define the specific business models for the new territories based on the CANVAS model methodology.
For the field visit, held yesterday, Fundación Valenciaport and Feel and Trip organised two activities. On the one hand, some of the participants were able to experience “A day as a fisherman”, an activity in which they had the opportunity to embark at dawn on a fishing boat, have breakfast with the fishermen, learn the different fishing techniques and discover the local marine species. The rest of the participants enjoyed a guided visit to the fish market and a workshop on the recognition of local marine species. Finally, everyone enjoyed the local gastronomy tasting a traditional recipe cooked with local fish.
TOURISMED PLUS
The European project TOURISMED PLUS is an initiative, funded by the Interreg MED Programme, which will continue the work developed in the previous “TOURISMED” project, which demonstrated that fishing tourism is an effective and replicable response to the threats related to the depletion of marine resources and the decline of the artisanal fishing sector.
TOURISMED demonstrated the premise that sustainable and experiential tourism represents a promising practice to be disseminated at the MED level, as it promotes a sustainable approach to maritime and coastal heritage, while raising tourists’ awareness of the marine ecosystem and culture of the regions involved.
In this new phase, the TOURISMED PLUS project will capitalise on the fishing tourism business model proposed in TOURISMED as a theoretical basis for the creation of draft public policies to implement this type of tourism in new Mediterranean territories.
With this objective, three of the TOURISMED partners: Fundacion Valenciaport, PRISM and PETRA PATRIMONIA CORSICA, which played a key role in terms of the quality of the pilot results, will lead the process of capitalisation and transfer to the new receiving territories (Molise, Montenegro and Bosnia), with which three public bodies (Azienda Autonoma di Soggiorno e Turismo di Termoli, Municipality of Ulcinj and Municipality of Neum) are collaborating.
Moreover, the consortium is complemented by five associated partners that will play a key role in disseminating the business model and in supporting local policy makers in fishing tourism: the Region of Molise, the Municipality of Fossacesia, the Corsica Tourism Agency, the Tourism Strategy Agency of the Balearic Islands and the Mediterranean Fishing Tourism Association.
