ERASMUS+ YOUTH EXCHANGE
INTERCULTURAL STORIES
collado mediano (spain) 2th to 9th March 2026
The Intercultural Stories exchange brought together 32 participants from five organisations from Spain, Portugal, France, Romania and Italy. The idea for the project emerged from our daily experience at Colectivo Yupanqui, an association where people from diverse backgrounds—primarily from Latin America and Spain—came together. Through this rich cultural exchange, we asked ourselves how we could foster better coexistence, challenge prejudices, and overcome our own barriers. The most meaningful answer we identified was to create space for participants to share the stories that shape their cultural identities.
The project:
Throughout history, stories—once transmitted mainly through oral traditions and now through written, audiovisual, and digital formats—have helped human communities explain who they are, what they value, and what distinguishes them from others.
Stories can take many forms: poems, songs, short tales, jokes, and other artistic expressions that convey moral lessons and shape shared understandings of the themes that matter most to us as human beings, such as love, loss, family relationships, belonging, and the creation of collective identities.
During the project, participants shared and blended stories from more than 15 diverse cultural backgrounds, both within and beyond Europe. Together, we created new collective narratives that reflect and represent who we are today.
The context:
In a European context shaped by cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity, stories are abundant and can sometimes appear to be in conflict. When we also consider migrant communities born outside Europe who bring their own collective imaginaries, the challenge of mutual understanding and coexistence becomes even greater.
From this challenge emerged the idea of Intercultural Stories. We believe that at the heart of the collective imaginaries of all peoples lie many shared values that bring us closer rather than divide us—such as the importance of love, family, friendship, and the protection of nature.
The objetives:
We aimed to create dialogue between the stories of the cultures participating in the project: to understand their origins, how material and social conditions have shaped them, how these narratives can adapt to a constantly changing world, and what kinds of new stories Europe needs today to collectively imagine a better future.
The objectives of the exchange were therefore to analyse popular stories from different cultures, understand their narrative dynamics, explore the new ways they are shared and disseminated, and co-create utopian and intercultural narratives about the sustainable, egalitarian, and diverse Europe we aspire to build.
The results:
Throughout the experience, we learned about the stories of the participating countries as well as local and personal stories shared by our peers. Together, we explored and deconstructed these narratives to find common ground, while reflecting on how the myths and stories we grow up with influence our daily lives and identities.
This process allowed us to create new stories in which we feel more represented, bringing together our cultures and recognising that, although stories may have different names and characters, many cultures are built upon shared symbols that make mutual understanding possible.
During the final celebration, we presented these collective creations and celebrated the opportunity to exchange our stories, generating shared knowledge and enjoyment. We also created a “Library of Myths and Legends” to document the stories shared by participants, and developed an Intercultural Stories Interactive Memoir, where some of the creations produced during the exchange are compiled and preserved.
