European Heritage Days: Discovering european heritage step by step

Landscapes, villages, places of worship, traditions, and stories: along the Romea Strata, European heritage becomes a journey to experience, explore, and rediscover one step at a time.

September marks European Heritage Days, an initiative promoted by the Council of Europe and the European Commission. Every year, this event invites millions of people to rediscover the surrounding cultural wealth through special openings, tours, events, and widespread initiatives across Europe.

But what do we really mean when we talk about heritage?

It is not just about museums, major monuments, or iconic paintings . European heritage also lives in the landscapes we cross, the small towns, churches, traditions passed down by communities, and the stories that have accompanied the journey of men and women across the continent for centuries.

And this is precisely where walking routes offer us a different perspective.

Walking through european history

Ancient routes have never simply connected a starting point to a destination. Over the centuries, pilgrims, merchants, and travelers walked these paths, bringing along their culture, knowledge, traditions, and ideas.

This is how the vast, widespread cultural heritage we encounter while walking across Europe today was formed.

Following a route like the Romea Strata means slowly stepping into this history. It means arriving at well-known places, but also stopping in small villages and communities far from major tourist circuits. It means discovering a building, a tradition, or a local story, and understanding how that single element forms part of a much larger narrative.

This heritage gains even greater meaning when we manage to connect what we encounter along the way.

Making the treasures of the path visible

This core idea drives SMARTWAYS – Smart Cultural Heritage Resources for Destination Management along Historic Routes, a European project led by the European Association of the Romea Strata.

Launched as part of ECHOES – European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage, SMARTWAYS focuses on the heritage along two Cultural Routes of the Council of Europe: the Romea Strata and the Via Francigena. The project aims to make cultural content increasingly accessible and reusable through digital tools.

The initiative builds upon a database of over 3,000 geolocated points of cultural interest gathered during the previous rurAllure project. These locations are enriched with historical and thematic information, multimedia resources, and stories linked to both the tangible and intangible heritage of the regions.

The goal is not only to provide more information, but to bring to light places and stories that risk remaining on the margins of major tourist flows. Often, it is precisely in rural areas and smaller communities that walking reveals some of the most authentic expressions of European heritage.

Turaida: a story to encounter along the Romea Strata

To understand what this means in practice, reach the Romea Strata north, in Latvia.

Here, along the trail, lies the Turaida Museum Reserve—a SMARTWAYS partner—where heritage is not confined into a single building, but is intertwined with the surrounding landscape, history, and local memory.

This relationship between different places makes discovering heritage along a walking trail particularly captivating.

Reaching Turaida via a historic route embeds it within a broader context: the story of paths that, for centuries, allowed people and cultures to move across Europe, and which continue to link seemingly distant territories today.

Projects like SMARTWAYS help foster the broader perspective: connecting a site to the stories it holds, to its surrounding territory, and to the route it belongs to—bridging physical heritage with modern digital tools.

European Heritage Days are an invitation to shift our perspective: to slow down, step off the beaten path, and observe our surroundings more closely.

Along the Romea Strata, European heritage is not merely something to visit. It is a thread that guides the journey, connects communities, and continues, step by step, to tell the story of Europe.