Cultural heritage and tourism go closely together. Cultural tourism accounts for 40% of all tourism in Europe according to the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO), and cultural heritage is key for most Europeans when choosing a holiday destination.
Tourism as an industry thrives on collaboration and partnerships, and in 2025, Europeana is increasingly focussing our efforts on initiatives related tourism and media. For tourism, in particular, our mission is to develop new impactful reuse cases for tourism with cultural heritage.
Together with partners, we have joined forces with tmatic.travel to create three walking tours across three cities in three European countries - Amsterdam, Dublin and London - exploring queer history, statues and historic pubs.
We hope that you are inspired to take the walking tours - and even create your own! Read on for our guidance, tips and tricks on how to do so.
Define the where and what
An important first step is to decide the location you want to work with and then the topic of the tour. There are many walking tours available online or in the real-world, from general tourist highlights of cities to tours on niche topics. Think about what your tour can add to or differentiate from these. Tours which include lesser-known sites and areas and hidden histories can contribute to sustainable tourism strategies.
Start with cultural heritage collections
Cultural heritage collections offer a fantastic insight into the history of places. Digital objects integrated into walking tour apps - from historical images to audiovisual material or 3D reconstructions - can bring the past to life, and help visitors learn more about the places around them. Think about how these can tell a story of a town or city while guiding visitors through the streets.
These digitised collections could be from a local library, museum or archive, for example showing how a building looked in the past or the artworks of an artist who lived at a location. There is a wealth of collections on Europeana.eu which are openly licensed. We found it very important to make the connection between the images featured and the places on the tour, explaining this in the tour text and audio.
Have you been on a walking tour where the guide has printed sheets showing historical images, probably laminated or in a plastic folder? For the tours we curated, the images sourced from Europeana.eu aimed to replicate this feeling - not simply showing what you can see for yourself, but adding a new level.
Choose your platform
There are many tour platforms or apps, some of which include gamified elements. We chose to create our tours on tmatic.travel. Others include Clio Muse Tours, Questo, SmartGuide and STQRY.
Make it manageable
A walking tour should be manageable and enjoyable for people to take part in. This means in terms of length, duration and the stories told. In general, more than 15 stops may make a tour too long, especially if more than 5 kilometres. 1-2 hours seems like a comfortable time to walk. It's also wise to keep a focus on the topic of the tour.
For example, in the case of the Queer Heritage of Amsterdam tour, it would not be possible to tell the entire history of the city - this could fill several books and there are many scholars and historians who have already published this. Instead, a tour should condense the history and link it to several places through the city.
Connect people to places
When telling the stories of cities and their histories, it is important to find links between places and people.
For example, in the Amsterdam queer heritage tour, it was helpful that there is a stolperstein (memorial stone) dedicated to artist Willem Arondéus at an address where he lived - there we could include some of his paintings. Learning that designer and activist Benno Premsela worked at the Bijenkorf department store created a link to tell his story at an appropriate place.
Think about your audience
On a walking tour, very few people want to hear a list of encyclopaedic facts. Instead, they prefer engaging and thought-provoking stories and anecdotes.
We wrote the tour as if speaking to a small group of people and used the first person pronoun - here we see, we are now at. It's also good to include some actions: here we can reflect on, this reminds us of - signposting and helping the audience.
In terms of storytelling, it's always good to familiarise yourself with Europeana's seven tips for digital storytelling.
Map it out
Unless you are very lucky, the stops along your tour are probably not in a chronological or narrative order. So it makes sense to tell the stories as standalone stories and to map out the order of the tour.
For the Dublin tour, we used a free paper map to draw the different stops on the paper to see what the best order would be. This also helps you estimate the length of the tour, both in terms of distance and time taken to walk.
It is also a very good idea to walk the tour a few times yourself - once by yourself to check the real-world conditions. It can be helpful to also do this with a few other people to test that the directions work and the stories are relevant.
Share it widely
For each of our tours, we created short promotional plans aiming to let as many people as possible know about the tours, including through postcards and other promotional material. Where possible, we created elements of the tours to pass by cultural heritage institutions or other businesses, contacting them to collaborate on promotional activities.
Get touring!
We hope you’ve inspired you to write your own walking tours! If you do make one using the collections on Europeana.eu, we’d love to hear about it - reach out to us at [email protected].
And if you’re in Amsterdam, Dublin or London make sure you take one of Europeana’s walking tours!