Europe Fund
What travel leaves behind.
Tourism arrives in a place and takes something out of it — a path, a language, a harbour wall, a summer. The Fund is the mechanism for putting something back: 12 projects, listed publicly, with the local partner named on each.
The Fund holds no money, and will not until three things are true
There is an operating entity; a regulated payment path with a named payee; and a written answer on how contributions are treated in each country we would collect in. Until then this is a register of projects and nothing else — there is no balance, no total raised, and no donate button anywhere on this site. The data files are validated to reject a project that carries an amount.
Rationale and the full gate: how it works.
12 projects on the register
Chosen for being small enough that a travel platform could plausibly matter to them, and specific enough that you could go and look at the result.
Romania
Saxon fortified churches, Transylvania
Around 150 fortified churches were built by German-speaking settlers in Transylvania between the 13th and 16th centuries. Most of the community that maintained them left after 1990, and the roofs are the first thing to go.
Romania
Hay meadows and the people who cut them
Transylvania's hay meadows hold some of the richest plant diversity in Europe, and they hold it because they are cut by hand at the right time each year. Mechanised cutting destroys them within a decade.
Romania
Wooden churches of Maramureș
Shingle-roofed oak churches built without nails, some from the 1600s, in villages of a few hundred people. Shingles last about thirty years and the craft of splitting them is held by a handful of people.
Norway
Sámi-language media and youth programmes
There are ten Sámi languages and several have fewer than a thousand speakers. Media and youth programming in the language does more for its survival than any monument.
Ireland
Dry stone walls, Inis Mór
Sixteen hundred kilometres of dry stone wall on an island fourteen kilometres long, built to clear the ground and to make soil out of sand and seaweed. They fall down and are rebuilt by hand or not at all.
Türkiye
Coast path erosion, the Lycian Way
540 kilometres of waymarked path opened in 1999, now carrying far more feet than it was built for, across soft limestone and through villages with no maintenance budget.
North Macedonia
Lake Ohrid endemic species monitoring
Between three and five million years old, with over sixty species found nowhere else, and under pressure from sewage, water abstraction and shoreline building.
Albania
Guesthouse training in the Albanian Alps
The Valbona-Theth crossing has gone from almost no visitors to thousands a season within a decade, and the money mostly stays local because the beds are family-run. That is fragile and worth protecting.
Greece
Sephardic Thessaloniki, documented
Thessaloniki was a majority-Sephardic city for four centuries. Almost the entire community was deported in 1943. The documentation of what was there is held in fragments across several countries.
Georgia
Qvevri makers, Kakheti
The clay vessels Georgian wine ferments in are made by a handful of families. The technique is on the UNESCO intangible heritage list and the number of working makers is in single figures.
Netherlands
Wadden Sea mudflat guiding
Walking the exposed sea floor at low tide requires a guide who knows the channels and the tide tables, and the licensing and training of those guides is entirely voluntary work.
Romania
Bear coexistence in the Carpathians
Romania holds most of Europe's brown bears. Conflict with people rises every year, driven largely by roadside feeding and unsecured rubbish, and the animals lose that argument.
7 kinds of work
What the register is actually made of. Sorted by how much of it each kind holds, and the bar is that share of the largest.
Landscape
Ireland, North Macedonia and Romania
Heritage Repair
Romania
Trails
Netherlands and Türkiye
Community
Albania
Craft
Georgia
Language
Norway
Memory
Greece