Innovative elements from the cross-over approach and the conception of a project aimed at serving different interests and needs of different visitor

Torrent, Patrick

Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert

What can visitors 
to Món Sant Benet do?  
Apart from activities geared to corporate groups
holding meetings, conventions or events as well
as from groups interested in gastronomy or sci-
ence applied to nutrition, private visitors will
meet new experiences at Món Sant Benet.
The tourist proposal is based on three differenti-
ated spaces: the medieval monastery, the Art
Nouveau space and the Alícia Foundation. Món
Sant Benet offers the possibility of combining two
or all three spaces according to the visitor’s time
availability.
The medieval space allows to experience a 12th
century atmosphere based on its heritage, but es-
pecially thanks to the sensorial recreation of
stimuli that carry us virtually a thousand years
back in time. This journey is reduced to a hun-
dred years in the Art Nouveau space, in which
multimedia technology and the room decoration
at the holiday home of the wealthy family of the
painter Ramon Casas place us in a creative and
colourful setting.
A leap forward brings us to present times, to the
Alícia (Nutrition and Science) Foundation, where
great Catalan chefs such as Ferran Adrià, advised
by scientists like Dr Valentí Fuster, run a research
centre devoted to technological research and cui-
sine creativity, but also to teaching nutrition ba-
sics to the youth.Visitors can go there, know the
goals of the project and look at how work is done
in the lab kitchens. Afterwards, a chef will offer a
small degustation combining senses with flavours
and explain how both affect our nutrition.
To complete the setting of these three spaces, the
hotel, restaurants and the beautiful landscape re-
quire a whole day for a complete visit to Món
Sant Benet.Visiting two spaces only can be done
in two or two hours and a half.
What is so innovative 
about Món Sant Benet?
In the first place, its multiproduct conception is
not frequent. It does not happen very often that a
tourist and cultural resource is conceived to serve
different interests and needs of different visitors.
When this occurs, it is often a consequence of the
maturation process of the tourist product and of
the need to attract increasingly specific market
segments. However, it is definitely not usual that
projects start from zero with this idea in mind.
The museum offer is as such innovative, with
state-of-the-art museological techniques turning
the visit to the monastery into a true tourist expe-
rience. Also, the restoration process intends to re-
spect the chronological footprint of the different
Strategies for innovation196
A first-class transversal
and innovative tourist
product
PATRICK TORRENT
building stages of the site. This respect for its her-
itage allows paradoxically to give the main role to
people. It allows to explain the thousand years of
history that separate us from Romanesque (with
Baroque and Art Nouveau in between) focusing
on the residents and their experience – from aus-
tere and laborious Benedictine life to the relaxed
and pleasant bourgeois summers of the Casas
family.
It does not happen very often that a
tourist and cultural resource is
conceived to serve different interests
and needs.
The other clearly innovative proposal is that of
gastronomy. The Alícia Foundation is above all a
unique scientific and gastronomic research centre.
However, it is conceived in an open way to wel-
come visitors of different ages to try and learn in
a distinctive setting, thanks to its creative avant-
garde atmosphere but also to the possibility of
being together with some of the most relevant
players in world cuisine. Our cuisine has already
been taking a leading role in our main tourist
markets for some years, basically driven by the
quality of our chefs, the recognition they have
earned at the most renowned gastronomic fo-
rums, in the most reputed guides and by cuisine
critics from all over who have spread the word of
our cuisine’s excellence.
However, all this would be in risk of passing by
as a one-off fashion trend if it was not under-
pinned by a true movement giving value to the
singularity of our gastronomic culture and doing
research to create proposals allowing to maintain
our privileged current position in the future. Alí-
cia will work along this second goal, without set-
ting aside the first one, to recover some food
products that used to be part of our traditional
cuisine but had gone lost with time. All these are
concepts that are met with increasing receptivity
in target markets and will clearly help us to con-
solidate the arguments by which our gastronomy
is already an important part of tourist promotion
by both public administration and the private
sector.
Also, the view of Món Sant Benet as a congress
centre for corporate meetings and business semi-
nars has been focused from a modern creative
perspective. Everything has been laid out for cre-
ating an unforgettable experience with visitors.
These singular experiences are the result of cross-
ing gastronomy at Alícia with history and art of
the medieval monastery and the Art Nouveau
space. All this stays open to interaction with the
visitor, typical of a tourist product conceived and
developed for the 21st century and especially
geared to congress tourism, one of the most so-
phisticated and demanding markets.
Business tourism is probably one of the domains
best suited for developing so-called creative
tourism. It is the main R&D focus within the in-
dustry, an area of innovation and experimentation
in which talent serves capturing new talent. After
197paradigmes / Issue no. 0 / May 2008
The restoration process intends to respect the
chronological footprint of the different building
stages of the site.
all, conventions, congresses and incentive trips
are acts of communication and even seduction.
All the creativity and resources are needed to
draw the attention of professionals attending
there, who are often saturated with flat, undiffer-
entiated proposals. So there is a need to surprise,
to create, to be different. Corporations choosing
Catalonia as the venue of their conventions or in-
centive trips will definitely not be indifferent with
such a unique proposal that will allow them to
surprise their guests thanks to its conceptual so-
lidity and brilliant resolution. The modularity of
the product further allows easy adaptation to the
programmes for visitors to Món Sant Benet, a
convenient advantage increasingly demanded by
convention organisers.
For all these reasons, we consider Món Sant
Benet to be an innovative initiative, exploring
new ways on which the first steps have been
made, such as the communication campaign that,
with the «timeless phenomena in Central Catalo-
nia» message, presents the special feelings expe-
rienced by visitors to the site as just another bit of
news in both the press and the internet.
Future tourist model
The promotion of our attractions is aimed at
keeping Catalonia’s leading position as an overall
tourist destination, geared to ensuring the devel-
opment of a renewed tourist model that allows to
place our emphasis on quality, thus avoiding any
future price debate. This is what the Strategic
Tourism Plan for Catalonia sets out, while it also
pleads for enlarging the territorial scope for
tourism.
However, such promotion requires a product
meeting these expectations. The Strategic Plan
also refers to the need of placing more products
rooted in their location to foster territorial bal-
ance. Besides, it clearly shows the need for devel-
opment in Central Catalonia, an area that has
largely been left aside by tourism for decades.
Private initiative started here a proposal that fully
fits into the strategic goal. The Nutrition and Sci-
ence Foundation (Alícia), partnered by the Caixa
Manresa savings bank and the Catalan govern-
ment, is a clear example of how public-private
cooperation can create big research and dissemi-
nation projects, but also first-class tourist prod-
ucts. Public and private support of the tourism in-
dustry is thus not to be underestimated as it
helps setting out the tourist model the industry
itself set out when it defined the strategic tourism
goals for Catalonia in 2005.
Business tourism is probably one 
of the domains best suited for
developing so-called creative tourism.
It is definitely pleasing to see that there are
tourist destinations, the leadership of which is ac-
knowledged everywhere, sharing this view of the
tourist model with Catalonia. Within the Euro-
pean Union, role models such as Tuscany and
Provence-Alps-Côte d’Azur created together with
Catalonia the Taskforce for Sustainable and Com-
petitive Tourism. They meet at least twice a year
to discuss precisely different aspects related to
the tourist model. Their diagnose is the same: en-
vironmental, social, cultural and economic sus-
tainability of destinations requires their singulari-
sation in order to give value to their identity. Our
mature destinations will increasingly depend on
their differentiating elements to be competitive.
In Catalonia, as in Provence and Tuscany, the
paths leading most effectively to this singularisa-
tion are culture, gastronomy, history, traditions,
legends etc.
Món Sant Benet is an outstanding crossroads of
all these paths. And it is so without over-sophisti-
cation, without inventing anything from scratch,
but simply by taking advantage of our reality and
explaining it well. This model is very different
from others pushing for mass, created sponta-
neously and for quick consumption, without any
relation to the territory nor any singularising fac-
tor. The model targeted by Catalonia intends to
Strategies for innovation198
get away from fast to slow tourism, with a distinc-
tive own flavour and taste, appreciating details, to
be enjoyed for all it has to offer, which makes it a
unique experience.
Món Sant Benet is a model intending
to get away from fast to slow tourism.
For all these reasons, the development of the
Món Sant Benet project can be considered a true
gift for our tourist model, for all it represents and
for its location. There was a clear need for such a
successful proposal and courage to come togeth-
er in Central Catalonia. With Món Sant Benet,
this area has now a new resource that is to be-
come a must for tourists and visitors and thus a
valuable new reason for attracting people from all
over. As the project becomes mature and takes its
position on the market, there will for sure not
only be corporate and academic groups coming
but also an increasing flow of individual visitors
interested in culture and gastronomy for which
the discovery of this world of feelings will be-
come ineluctable.
So let us welcome and wish a long successful life
to Món Sant Benet. At Turisme de Catalunya, we
already have included it in the list of our prime
cultural, gastronomic and meeting tourist offer
and we will feel especially proud to introduce it
to media, operators and consumers from all over
the world, convinced as we are of its singularity.
199paradigmes / Issue no. 0 / May 2008
PATRICK TORRENT
Degree in Psychology and Law.
Deputy director of Turisme de Catalunya since 2005.
Project coordinator of the strategic tourism plan in Catalonia 2005-2010. Eighteen
years professional experience in tourism, eleven of which as head of organisation of
the RACC leisure and tourism department and three as managing director of a
corporate travel agency of a pharmaceutical group.


A first-class transversal and innovative tourist product

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Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert