March 2024
Press release
The ecoRoute project focuses on the challenges and potential of tourism in Europe’s outermost regions. These regions face economic challenges, with limited industries, high unemployment rates, and low GDP. However, they benefit from cultural and natural values and the presence of significant biodiversity. Tourism plays a crucial role in their economy and more specifically, scuba diving tourism.
The ecoRoute proposal aims to develop a sustainable approach to underwater cultural and natural tourism in these regions by creating various diving itineraries. By combining underwater cultural heritage and natural resources, ecoRoute aims to create sustainable and diverse tourism experiences. The project will focus on strategic planning, policy development, capacity building, local interventions and ecotourism formulas integrating the circular economy. This project is an international collaboration between Greece, France and Portugal, focusing on the sites of the Azores, Madeira and Martinique.
The estimated cost is €999,996.15 over a 3-year period, financed by the European Union, under the coordination of Atlantis Consulting SA (Greece), with the participation of ENALIES technologies IKE (Greece), the University of Aix-Marseille (France), the NOVA University of Lisbon (Portugal), DeepTurtle diving centre (France), OMA observatorio do mar dos acores (Portugal), Associacao de turismo sustentavel do faial ilha azul (Portugal), centro de estudos de arqueologia moderna e contemporanea associacao CEAM (Portugal), association archeologie petites Antilles A.A.P.A (France).
The ecoRoute project aims to extend the tourist season, develop tourism that integrates the circular economy and create new employment opportunities. It also aims to stimulate new investments in cultural tourism, thus contributing to the growth of the regional economies of Martinique, Madeira and the Azores, according to a model intended to be duplicated in other regions.