Cultural Trips

The European outdoors are not empty. For millennia, they have been home to distinctive cultures — the Romansh speakers of the Swiss Engadin, the Ladins of the Dolomites, the shepherds of Crete who are said to descend from the Dorians, the Górale highlanders of the Tatras — whose ways of life were shaped by and adapted to the extreme conditions of their environment. These people erected fortresses, built churches, constructed old bridged, laid out cobbled trails and shaped landscapes around them. At Red Fox Trails, our cultural itineraries are designed to connect our guests with this unique historical, natural and cultural heritage.

Historical Sites & Living History

Our cultural trails always integrate the historical dimension of the landscapes we move through. In the Dolomites, we walk the First World War battlefields of the Cinque Torri and the Lagazuoi, visiting the extraordinary tunnels and galleries carved at 2,500m by Italian soldiers in 1915-18. In Cyprus, we spend half a day with an icon painter who has studied the Byzantine technique in Greece and now works in the tradition of the great medieval fresco painters.

In the Maramureș region of Romania, we attend a Sunday church service in one of the UNESCO-listed wooden churches, observing a religious tradition that has continued without interruption since the 17th century — and which, in its music, its vestments, and its community, provides a direct window into the past.

And if city life appeals to you, we’ve got you covered too: in Poland’s royal capital, Kraków , you can wander through centuries of medieval streets, Renaissance courtyards, and Baroque architecture — all while remaining just an hour away from the mountain wilderness of the Tatras.

On our Castle and Fortresses of the Alps tour, we visit the great strongholds and noble residences of the past, experiencing them in all their grandeur and austere beauty. as we travel through the Alps highest regions.

Gastronomy

Mountain food is the product of necessity, ingenuity, and extraordinary local ingredients. In the Aosta Valley, we visit high-altitude Alpeggio (alpine farm) where the milk of cows that have grazed on 50 different species of mountain flower produces cheeses of incomparable depth and complexity. In the Dolomites, we eat at rifugi (mountain huts) that serve Schlutzkrapfen (spinach and ricotta dumplings) and Speck (smoked ham) made according to centuries-old recipes.

In Crete and in Slovenia, we visit family wineries, tasting wines made from indigenous grape varieties that were nearly lost and are now being revived by a new generation of winemakers. In Madeira, the combination of a subtropical micro-climate with local vinification skills yields wines with flavors unlike anything you might have tried before.

Artisanal Crafts

In the Val Gardena (Selva di Val Gardena) in the Dolomites, the tradition of wood carving has been practiced without interruption since the 17th century. We visit working studios where master carvers — some of whose families have been carving for 10 generations — create figures of extraordinary fineness from Arolla pine and Swiss stone pine. In Zakopane, we meet Górale craftspeople who still make traditional leather shoes (kierpce), embroidered waistcoats, and hand-carved furniture according to methods unchanged for 300 years.