The 1st January marked Grantourismo’s 15th birthday and 15 years dedicated to delicious food and travel experiences rooted in slow, local and experiential travel – ways of experiencing places, interacting with locals, and getting insights into everyday life, culture and cuisine in ways we’ve long believed are more immersive, engaging and enriching, more meaningful and memorable, and, increasingly importantly, more sustainable, ethical and responsible.
We launched Grantourismo way back on the 1st January 2010 when we announced a yearlong global adventure, inspired by the ‘grand tour’, and a slow, local and experiential travel quest aimed at inspiring our readers to travel more slowly, locally and experientially. Fifteen years later we’re renewing that commitment to more sustainable, ethical and responsible travel and food.
If you’re new to Grantourismo, you can read more about that project on the links above, but in a nutshell: the idea came about in 2003 when we were writing our first Lonely Planet guidebook to Syria and Lebanon. We were frustrated that the focus of guidebooks was always on places to go and there weren’t opportunities to write about the people we met when we travelled, yet it was the locals we encountered who made our experience of places so memorable.
Over the next years we began to think about how we could travel in ways that were more meaningful and more memorable fore us. Then one night in 2009 in my family’s kitchen we fleshed out a plan for a yearlong trip where we’d travel slowly, locally and more experientially, staying in apartment rentals and holiday houses, focusing our time on local neighbourhoods rather than tourist zones, and connecting with local people.
We wanted to immerse ourselves in each place for a month (we ended up compromising with our project sponsors and stayed two weeks); focus on learning about local life, culture and food by getting hands-on and learning how to do things; only using local businesses, spending money locally by buying local produce and local products; reducing our environmental footprint and, whenever we could, giving back to places.
For us, these were all ways that would make travel more immersive, more engaging and more enriching, and therefore more meaningful and more memorable. But they were also ways of travelling that we believed were more sustainable, more ethical and more responsible. After that 12-month trip ended, we decided to make that style of travelling, rooted in slow, local and experiential travel, our lifelong project. Fifteen years, we’re still going.
But before I tell you more about how we’re planning on celebrating 15 years of Grantourismo, I have a favour to ask. Grantourismo is reader-supported. If you’ve found our travel and food posts inspirational and informative, please consider supporting Grantourismo by using our links to buy something on Amazon, such as these cookbooks for culinary travellers or travel books to inspire wanderlust or browse our Grantourismo store for gifts for travel and food lovers, designed with Terence’s images.
Celebrating 15 Years of Enriching Travel and Delicious Food and Our 2025 Plans
Ever since that yearlong trip, we’ve used this anniversary to renew our commitment to advocating forms of travel and food that are more sustainable, responsible and ethical – and there’s never been a time when we all need to be more responsible when it comes to the decisions we make about travelling, as well as how we live when we’re at home, and I’ve thought about this a lot over the last year.
As I’ve been working on our content plan for 2025 in recent weeks, my reflections keep turning to certain issues and problems, and how we can do our bit to cover those more, to help our readers travel and eat better, as well as how we can contribute in more positive ways to make a difference.
That doesn’t mean that we’re changing our direction when it comes to the content we share here – we’ve always provided advice as to how to be a better traveller, how to be a greener traveller, how to travel more responsibly, and how to travel more meaningfully – and we know that since the pandemic the majority of readers come mostly for the food and our recipes.
That won’t change. Food has always been a major part of life and travel for us. There are few things that bring people together like a shared meal around a table. We’ll continue to share food stories and recipes from places we’ve lived and loved, from Southeast Asia to the Middle East. But we are going to make some changes…
More of the Type of Travel Content You Read
We’re going to increase our travel coverage again, which we reduced back in 2020, at the start of the pandemic, with a focus on helping our readers travel better. You can expect more travel advice from us. We’ve been travel writers and guidebook authors for well over 20 years, after all, so we have a lot of tips to share, which will take the form of posts such as this first time flying guide, which proved popular.
We’ll also be sharing more tips from local experts, especially on problems such as overtourism, the ethical dilemmas of travelling to certain places, and how travellers can give back to places. This guide to how travellers can contribute to reducing overtourism in Barcelona is an example of the kind of posts we’d like to share more of with you.
We’ll also be updating many travel guides, hotel guides and itineraries, which were some of our most popular travel posts of 2024, and filling holes when it comes to coverage of places we know intimately and love yet never got around to covering completely. For instance, we lived in Vietnam before Cambodia, have got back regularly, yet there’s a lot of Vietnam content we still haven’t shared. That will change soon.
More of the Kind Of Recipes You Love
We know from our most popular recipes of 2024, including our most popular weekend eggs recipes, that many readers arrive here having searched for recipes for dishes from Asia, the region where we’ve lived for 15 years, since our yearlong grand tour ended, and Russian recipes, so we’ll continue to share my Russian-Ukrainian family recipes and Southeast Asian recipes.
You can expect a lot of new recipes over the next two months, with Russian Orthodox Christmas on 7 January, Australia Day on 25 January, Chinese New Year and Lunar New Year on 29 January, and Ramadan starting in February – which is as good an excuse as any to share more recipes from the Middle East, a region we lived, worked and travelled in for almost a decade.
Let Us Know What You Want to Read
Don’t hesitate to drop by and let us know what you’d like to read – where you’re hoping to travel, food you’d like to learn more about, recipes you fancy cooking – and share your feedback and tips on places you’ve been and dishes you’ve cooked, or ask a question. We reply to every reader comment.
You Can Save Your Favourite Recipes and Posts
And don’t forget that you can always create your own private account by clicking on the heart on the right of any post where you can save your favourite stories and recipes.
Happy New Year – and Happy Travelling, Cooking and Eating in 2025!
Lara & Terence xx
Pictured? Calabria, a still relatively off the beaten track destination in southern Italy that is spectacular but doesn’t suffer from overtourism, so you can travel the region guilt-free.
