Observatório CREATOUR: CES-UBI Winter School: Mapping culture, communities and landscapes to [re]generate future heritage, Wool Museum of the University of Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal, 13-17 October 2026. Deadline: 27 July 2026.
Cultural mapping serves as a bridge between tangible assets and the living narratives of a community. At its core, cultural mapping aims to make visible the ways that local cultural assets, stories, practices, relationships, memories, and rituals constitute places as meaningful locations, while bringing a diverse range of stakeholders into conversation about the local cultural dimensions and potentials. This CES-UBI Winter School focuses on combining cultural mapping methodologies to develop and apply a systemic approach to local development based on culture, creativity and regenerative tourism.
Covilhã is a UNESCO Creative City of Design, located on the slopes of the Serra da Estrela mountain. It offers a unique backdrop with a strong wool textile industry heritage, a rich labour union history, a wide natural landscape, and a lively contemporary arts scene. Participants will be immersed in Covilhã’s living nature-culture heritage landscape where a wool ecosystem has been developed for centuries. The programme directly addresses the region’s contemporary challenges, including the climate crisis (wildfires and severe storms) and socio-economic shifts like depopulation and aging, examining how regenerative planning can mitigate these impacts on the lived experience of smaller communities.
The programme is co-organised by the CREATOUR Observatory at CES, the iA* Arts Research Unit, the Wool Museum of the University of Beira Interior, and 4iS Inovação Social. The Winter School is hosted at the Wool Museum, an interdepartmental centre of the University of Beira Interior. Located in the former Royal Textile Factory, an 18th-century dyehouse, the museum exemplifies the city’s ability to repurpose industrial heritage for academic, artistic and cultural life.
This Winter School is a unique opportunity to enhance knowledge and to gain skills on cultural mapping and culture-based development. Throughout the five-day programme, participants will engage in a mix of site visits, local networking, learning seminars, and hands-on workshops, ending with an ideation and prototyping lab where attendees will actively engage in designing culture-tourism projects that address real-life local development issues, community needs, and expectations. Through these activities, participants will examine, discuss, and generate new ideas to enhance existing initiatives and inspire future projects, with a particular focus on regenerative approaches to culture and tourism that support broader local development in Covilhã.
The course concludes with a public presentation where participants share their curated project ideas with the local community. This collaborative output ensures that the knowledge generated during the school has a direct, visible connection to the people and places that inspired it.
Organizers welcome professionals from the private and public sectors (e.g., municipalities); policy-makers; graduate and PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in the social sciences, tourism, design, economics, or cultural management-related areas; and practitioners and planners working with culture and/or tourism strategies for local development.
Participants should have a good knowledge of English as the Winter School will be held in English and group work will be an essential component of the course, as well as an interest in one or more of the following areas: cultural development, urban regeneration, tourism management, or local development.
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 