26th of September is the day, internationally dedicated to Carpathian Mountains.

We had spend this day in the Carpathian mountainous Synevyr community, where we, together with representatives of municipality, department of tourism, U-Lead with Europe project, and community members, discussed vision of future development and main challenges, the community faces or anticipates in nearest future, in the fields of agrifood and ecosystem management, mobility and nature and culture based tourism within the RURACTIVE project.

First of all we looked at the Synevyr community development strategy, elaborated in 2021 and discussed what has been implemented so far and what is ongoing. After that the group has dived into discussion of those aspects of community life, which are not working well and require solutions.

Among them we found many, related to basics of safe and comfort life of local inhabitants and visitors, namely:
- absence of street lights, signs, names of streets, traffic and tourism signs;
- absence to lack of designated sidewalks, street crossings and other infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists;
- complicated connection between the remote parts of the community and central villages;
- public transport that does not respond to the needs of community inhabitants;

Besides this, we discussed other main elements of community life, such as:
- weaknesses in communication between municipality and tourims service providers and lack of intermunicipal cooperation;
- low quality of tourism services and weak offer of adjacent services;
- absence of unified policy on tourism development and promotion at this destination;
- lack of understanding by the community as a whole about the importance of tourism develoment and joint efforts in this directions;

and also talked about the situation with natural resources in the community: - there is a resource of mushrooms and berries, medicinal herbs and pure spring water, but no processing offer within the community;
- absence of community markets to sell extra products of the households and other challenges.

As a closing highlight of the meeting, we tried out AI tool, provided to us by Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, to visualise vision, formulated by the group, and one of the results you can check in the photos.

Life in the remote mountainous rural communities, such as Synevyr community is, indeed needs discussions and co-searching of solutions to improve basics of rural life as well as innovative solutions for community to prosper, keep its inhabitants within the community, attract visitors and tourists.

RURACTIVE project continue its work and we really hope with its support to find helpful innovative solutions for Ukrainian communities.

Greatefult to U-LEAD with Europe, Department of tourism and resorts in Zakarpattya regional state administration, Synevyr community, and all participants for productice work.