Children in Ljubljana’s primary schools are marking World Tourism Day by inviting people to come to Ljubljana

Ljubljana Tourism has joined forces with the Department for Pre-school Education at the Municipality of Ljubljana and invited Ljubljana’s primary schools to help create postcards in foreign languages for their peers around the world. The response was exceptional, and the sincerity of the children very touching. A selection of postcards in 16 different languages will be posted this week on the social media networks Facebook, Twitter and Instagram Visitljubljana.

Citizens are the best ambassadors of a destination, so it is good that the capital’s beauty is already valued by its youngest inhabitants. But what would be a pleasant way to find out how they see Ljubljana? The people at Ljubljana Tourism designed a postcard and asked children to fill it out in a foreign language they know or are learning, and invite a friend from abroad to visit Ljubljana.

The response was outstanding. In just over a week the public institute had received a large number of postcards in various different languages - the EU languages and also Latin, Turkish, Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew and Hindi, among others. The primary school children presented their favourite parts of the city and what they like doing there in a few sentences. The content was sincere, direct, sometimes really touching and accompanied by the children’s drawings. The words of thanks by Ljubljana’s primary school teachers were also particularly nice. They expressed the wish for more similar projects as they really had fun making the postcards, and combined it with talking about the importance of tourism and speaking foreign languages. By writing postcards in Latin they discovered the role of Emona in the past, and also played around with describing present-day life in an ancient language. Parents helped make some of the postcards, something that pleased Ljubljana Tourism because they wanted to attract as many people as possible to participate in the project.

Although the texts written by the children are in foreign languages, this is actually the continuation of a citizen campaign that Ljubljana Tourism began this spring. The aim of the project is to encourage residents, including the youngest, to become ambassadors of this destination and begin having a positive attitude to tourism as something that enables us to connect, socialise and discover the world.

In this way they are sending a message on World Tourism Day that tourism is a factor in internationalisation and cultural exchanges between Slovenia and the rest of the world, that Ljubljana is a city that is open to all cultures, religions and nations, and that tourism makes an important contribution to this.