Cultural Routes for Promoting Mutual Understanding and Exchanges across Boundaries

Tourism is not only an economic sector but at the same time, has social, cultural and environmental impacts on host communities, tourist-sending countries, and tourists. Cultural tourism in general and cultural routes as an important component of cultural tourism offer a big potantial for a sustainable tourism development. Besides economic, socio-cultural, and environmental benefits for host communities, cultural routes play an important role in mutual understanding and exchanges across boundaries. The paper particularly focuses on solidarity, mutual understanding, cultural exchange, inter-cultural dialogue, and cooperation features of cultural routes. In the second part of the paper, as a case study some established contacts, project proposals, and initiatives between Southeast European countries are tried to explore by some examples.