Ungheni City Hall has announced that it has begun drawing up a «strategy for harnessing the cultural heritage of the Middle Prut Valley within European tourist routes» for the 2027–2033 period. The wording sounds technical, but behind it lies a concrete project — with European money and a partner across the Prut.
An Ungheni–Iași project, funded by the European Union
The strategy is one of the deliverables of the project «Gateways for the sustainable integration of the culture of the Middle Prut Valley into European tourist routes», funded through the cross-border Interreg NEXT Romania–Republic of Moldova 2021–2027 programme. In this project, the lead is Ungheni City Hall, and the partner — Iași City Hall. «The Middle Prut Valley», in this framework, means first of all the cultural corridor between the two cities, on both banks of the river.
The first of the five working sessions planned for August took place on 4 August, online, and brought together over 60 participants from about 50 institutions on both banks of the Prut. The drafting of the document is assisted by the Association for Tourism Development in Moldova.
«European tourist routes» — what it means concretely
The stated aim is to integrate local heritage into cultural and tourist circuits at European level. At the working session, the Council of Europe Cultural Routes were presented as a model — thematic networks that link heritage sites across several countries. For now, this is a direction of work and an example of good practice, not an already certified route.
A first inventory of the heritage, carried out within the project, found a surprisingly large potential: approximately 2,500 cultural sites, across an area stretching over ten districts of the Republic of Moldova and three counties of Romania — even though the project itself has only two partners, the municipalities of Ungheni and Iași.
What Ungheni gains, beyond the document
A project is not limited to a strategy on paper. The same project funds, in Ungheni, the modernisation and energy-efficiency upgrade of the House of Culture — works on the exterior of the building, with a budget initially estimated at about 890,000 euros, which we wrote about when the councillors voted on the appearance of the façade. In addition, the project provides for a QR-code system for heritage sites, equipment and a series of cross-border events. According to the project’s data, the total budget amounts to about 1.67 million euros, of which approximately 1.3 million for the Ungheni side, and implementation runs from June 2025 to June 2027.
The 2027–2033 strategy thus comes on top of a tourism infrastructure the city has already built in recent years — from the «Ungheni – urban value» route, with its stops from the «Eiffel» Bridge to the cathedral, to the Tourist Information Centre. These latter assets come from a different European programme, but the strategy is meant precisely to link them into a coherent offer and to extend the effort beyond the end of the project, in 2027.