Great Spa Towns of Europe WHS youth twinning project
November 27, 2024
The first ever project involving young people in Great Spa Towns of Europe (GSTE) recently took place in the Austrian town of Baden bei Wien. The project, known as INTERSPACE (Inter-Spa Town Celebration of European Heritage), aims to encourage young people to discover their own and others’ spa heritage, and is funded by the European Union through the CERV Town Twinning Programme.
After a year of intense planning and preparation, nearly 100 pupils from five of the eleven towns of the Great Spa Towns of Europe and speaking at least four different languages travelled to Baden bei Wien for a three-day educational programme, coinciding with the GSTE Association’s autumn General Assembly. The return twinning trip will take place in May 2025 at the spring General Assembly in the Czech town of Mariánské Lázně.
Online workshops with pupils aged between 12-15 from five schools in three separate countries and teachers and GSTE site managers took place. These sessions were led by external facilitators Socionaut, a Czech-based interdisciplinary practice whose expertise in place-based co-design approaches is invaluable to the project. Socionaut is facilitating INTERSPACE on the ground too, helping to deliver the main aims of the project: promoting inter-cultural dialogue, mutual understanding, friendship and awareness of the unique European story embodied in the Great Spa Towns of Europe. Pupils from Františkovy Lázně, Karlovy Vary and Mariánské Lázně (Czechia), Vichy (France), and Bad Kissingen (Germany) have already joined their fellow pupils in Baden bei Wien for a packed programme based on Baden’s three longstanding pillars of medicine, nature and fun.
To conclude the first half of the project, a representative group of young people presented their ideas to the Mayors of the GSTE and States Parties Representatives at the General Assembly on 14th November. They shared their ideas for a future GSTE Youth Forum, and will develop them further in spring 2025.
Images: ©2024psb/sap/c.kollerics/sk