This website is dedicated to a new tourism project called "The Little Loire". To define this project, the City of Zottegem has commissioned an inventory of the heritage of the area of the river Scheldt and its tributaries, to examine its potential for European heritage tourism. 

The "Little Loire" alludes to the region of the Loire with its spacious palaces, pleasure gardens, landscapes and travel delights.



Within this project, each participating partner can present its historical highlights, both in a rural and urban context, to create a common promotion and presentation of the Scheldt region.  The goal of this project, initiated by the city of Zottegem, is to develop an inter-regional European tourism cooperation with the relevant regions: Le Nord et Le Pas Calais, L'Avesnois, Hainaut, East Flanders , West Flanders and several European organisations of private castle owners. The goal is to create an economical validation of heritage in the perspective of sustainable heritage management. This can be realized by working on two levels: the inter-regional presentation and the practical local organisation. Presentation and communication will be based on modern Internet technologies. 

Here is an overview of the Scheldt area and its points of interest (if you view this on a PC/Mac, you can click on the map for details):

The Little Loire area overview


A flyer of the Little Loire is available at: Reports

On this website, you will find the results of the preliminary study for the Little Loire project. 
  • The website contains an inventory of the castles, religious buildings, archaeologic sites and landscapes with links to additional information.  
  • In a synopsis, an analysis of the inventory is given and incentives about the Little Loire as cooperation partnership for all parties are listed. 
  • In UnlockIT, we propose the use of IT technologies to unlock the vast potential of the Little Loire sites.  
  • The gallery provides a selection of good images of the sites of the project.  
  • Reports allows you to download texts that have resulted from this preliminary study.