Sustainability has become a key concept for tourism development. Understanding and using local resources, developing an area in a way that is in line with the wishes and aspirations of the local community is essential, however, not without complications. Communities themselves are multi-faceted entities, with diverging interests and understandings about local heritage, its value and its possible social/economic role. Relying on the research carried out in the TExTOUR (Social Innovation and Technologies for sustainable growth through participative cultural TOURism) project the paper explores community attitudes towards local heritage and tourism, and creates a more in-depth picture about the challenges and perspectives of bottom-up driven cultural tourism development, as well as its social context. The paper uses the results of the qualitative interviews and focus groups carried out in 8 pilots in the course of 2021, and relies on deliverables produced in the project. TExTOUR is an EU-funded project operating for 45 months, which co-designs pioneering and sustainable cultural tourism strategies to improve deprived areas in Europe and beyond. The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No.101004687. The project started in January 2021 and finishes in September, 2024. More details about the project can be found in its website: https://textour-project.eu/ The two deliverables in question are TExTOUR D1.3 “Data collection methodology” and TExTOUR D1.4 “Results from the data collection phase”.