The village of Görlitz sits on the western bank of the Neisse River, in the easternmost corner of Germany. On the opposite bank lies Zgorzelec, in Poland. Until 1945, it was one city. The war split it in two, and for decades the border was an iron curtain, first literal, then psychological. Today residents cross freely, and a growing number of tourists come specifically to experience what it means to stand in a city that was torn apart by history and slowly, imperfectly, stitched back together.
Görlitz-Zgorzelec is one of dozens of twin towns along Europe's internal borders where small-scale tourism operators, guesthouse owners, tour guides, café proprietors, artisan producers, are quietly practising one of the most practical forms of peacebuilding available: cross-border hospitality.
The EU's internal borders, stripped of their checkpoints since the Schengen Agreement, are still borders in the cultural imagination. Languages change, prices change, architectures change, and the histories told on either side of a river or a mountain pass can be startlingly different. Small-scale tourism operators in these regions understand, often intuitively, that their work involves more than selling beds and breakfasts. It involves helping visitors, and their own communities, develop a more nuanced understanding of shared space.
In the Tyrolean Alps, Austrian and Italian communities separated by the South Tyrol's complex political history have developed joint tourism initiatives that foreground their shared Alpine culture rather than their linguistic and national differences. Hiking routes cross between the two countries without ceremony, and farm stays on either side of the border advertise themselves in both German and Italian. The hospitality itself, generous, warm, rooted in mountain traditions, communicates something that no policy document could.
Along the French Spanish border in the Basque Country, a region with its own fraught history of political violence and separatist conflict, tourism operators have developed itineraries that explicitly engage with the Basque cultural identity shared across the international boundary. Visitors are invited not just to eat pintxos and watch pelota, but to understand the complex politics of identity and territory that have shaped the region, and to see how culture, language, and cuisine have survived and thrived despite, or perhaps because of, those complexities.
In the eastern borders of the EU, between Poland and Ukraine, Hungary and Serbia, Romania and Moldova, the picture is more urgent. With conflict in Ukraine reshaping the region's demographics and political landscape, border communities are grappling with new pressures. But here too, small-scale tourism operators are playing a role. Guesthouses that are hosting refugees are also hosting travellers. Cultural centres that are teaching Ukrainian language to new arrivals are also running heritage tours for visitors. The infrastructure of welcome is proving adaptable.
What strikes researchers studying these communities is the way that tourism language, the vocabulary of welcome, discovery, and exchange, creates space for conversations that political language sometimes forecloses. When a guest asks their host about the history of the border they've just crossed, they receive an answer shaped by lived experience rather than official narrative. That answer is more honest, more complex, and more human than anything they might find in a guidebook.
For the Paths to Peace project, the border region model offers a compelling vision: tourism not as an escape from the complexities of the world, but as a way of entering into them , with curiosity, respect, and the hope that understanding is always possible, even across the oldest and deepest divisions.