Discover Greece’s UNESCO New Cultural Routes – Sustainable Travel

A round of high-level meetings in Paris has placed sustainable cultural tourism at the top of the shared agenda between Greece and UNESCO. Greek Tourism Minister Olga Kefalogianni sat down with UNESCO Director-General Khaled El-Enany to discuss deepening their cooperation, with new cultural routes and stronger safeguards for cultural heritage among the subjects on the table.

Greek Tourism Minister Olga Kefalogianni and UNESCO Director-General Khaled El-Enany in Paris, where their discussions focused on strengthening cooperation in sustainable cultural tourism.

For the Greek Tourism Ministry, the ambition is to build a closer working relationship with UNESCO around sustainable cultural tourism. Two themes stood out from the talks: the development of new cultural routes, and initiatives designed to protect cultural heritage. The underlying idea is straightforward — travel and heritage should reinforce one another, so that visiting well-known treasures actively helps rather than harms the fabric that draws people in the first place.

The meetings took place recently in Paris, where the minister met not only Director-General Khaled El-Enany but also Nayef Al-Fayez, UNESCO's Assistant Director-General for Culture. With both voices present, the conversations could move between high-level policy and the cultural programs that put it into practice.

At the heart of the discussions lay the search for opportunities to launch joint initiatives, exchange expertise, and shape approaches that tie tourism development directly to protecting and promoting cultural heritage. In practical terms, that means Greece identifying openings for shared projects, and both sides testing how travel can serve conservation goals rather than compete with them.

The Greek side also used the meetings to underline how cultural tourism can anchor a sector that is more sustainable, more resilient and better balanced against shocks. Importantly, the benefits described were meant to reach past the well-established destinations and the busiest weeks of the year — the places and the season that usually absorb most of the attention. A heritage-led approach, the argument runs, can carry value into destinations and months that currently see far less of it, a point with obvious relevance for a country whose map spreads across mainland regions and islands alike.

Equally telling was the breadth of what the two sides intend to promote. The approach reaches past monuments and archaeological sites — the stones most visitors picture first — to embrace intangible cultural heritage as well: the local traditions, gastronomy and cultural activities of communities that give a destination its living identity. Food may be Greece's most persuasive ambassador of all, and travelers who set out on a culinary journey through Greece discover flavors and stories that no ruin can tell on its own.

Greek Tourism Minister Olga Kefalogianni with UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Culture Nayef Al-Fayez in Paris.

One thread ran visibly through the entire conversation: the need to balance tourism growth with heritage protection. Priorities discussed included managing visitor flows responsibly at cultural sites, building their resilience against climate change, and bringing local communities into a far more active role. Each responds to a different kind of pressure — crowds arriving at the wrong moment in fragile places, a shifting climate testing historic buildings and sites, and the risk that residents become bystanders in their own story.

The development of new cultural routes was also identified as a promising area of cooperation between Greece and UNESCO, sitting alongside knowledge-sharing and initiatives that back sustainable cultural tourism. Routes work by connection: they link sites, traditions and communities into a single experience, drawing movement through a region instead of letting it pool around a handful of famous landmarks.

The shared aim, as the talks framed it, is twofold. The first is to inspire visitors to venture further afield, to a broader spread of destinations and experiences — to look past the classic itinerary toward the quieter corners of the country, whether that means small inland villages or the hidden beaches in Greece that reward those who go beyond the familiar shorelines. The second is to help keep cultural heritage intact for future generations, so that what travelers love today is still there, undiminished, for those who follow.

From left: Vasiliki Koutsoukou, Secretary General for Tourism Policy and Development; Greek Tourism Minister Olga Kefalogianni; and Giorgos Koumoutsakos, Greece's Permanent Representative to UNESCO, during the minister's visit to Paris for talks on cultural tourism and heritage protection.

Kefalogianni also tabled a broader proposal: strengthening cooperation between UNESCO and the World Tourism Organization (UN Tourism), the United Nations tourism agency, through joint initiatives that tie the protection of cultural heritage to responsible tourism development. Bringing the two bodies closer would place the guardians of the world's heritage and the promoters of global travel more firmly on the same page.

That proposal centers on international dialogue, the exchange of expertise, and tourism practices that help local communities thrive while keeping cultural identity intact. The reasoning is simple enough: the communities that welcome travelers are also the custodians of the traditions and identities that make a destination worth traveling to, and their voice deserves real weight in how tourism develops.

Beneath the specifics sits an even wider objective — making sure tourism contributes to safeguarding and showcasing cultural heritage, rather than merely drawing on its pull for visitors. If the Paris talks are any indication, Greece wants its visitors to be guests who give something back to the places they admire. For a country where heritage and travel are inseparable, that is a direction of travel worth watching.