Santorini | 23–25 October 2026
A 2.5-day immersive summit at the intersection of wellbeing, landscape and regeneration.
Hearth Summit Aegean
A gathering rooted in place
Hearth Summit Aegean 2026 is an immersive, place-based gathering in Santorini engaging the wider Cycladic bioregion as a living system, exploring wellbeing, ecological belonging, and regeneration.
Set within an island shaped by tourism, climate, infrastructure, local knowledge and culture, the Summit brings together voices from research, technology, policy, arts, and local communities to explore how islands can become living laboratories for ecological resilience, citizen science, and nature-based solutions.
Expect to meet researchers, scientists, applied technologists, policymakers, entrepreneurs, artists, cultural institutions, local business owners, and members of the island community from fishermen and farmers to gallery owners and civic organisations, exploring new approaches to resilience and ecological belonging.
Grounded in the understanding that wellbeing emerges through interconnected systems, the programme explores the relationships between land, water, energy, ecosystems, culture, and economy as realities that are deeply lived in Santorini itself.
Across discussions, field visits, shared meals, and collective experiences, participants will exchange ideas, build connections, and engage with the island beyond its mesmerizing postcard sunsets.
Hearth Summit Aegean 2026 explores how regeneration and wellbeing can be practiced in real places, here and now.
From Athens to Cyclades
In 2024, the Hearth Summit took place in Athens, bringing together 243 participants and 81 speakers from Greece, Europe and the United States.
The Summit explored wellbeing cities: how urban life can be shaped around care, resilience and more balanced ways of living.
Across conversations, a shared understanding emerged: cities are part of wider living systems that connect people, nature and economies.
Hearth Summit Aegean 2026 emerges from this expanding perspective.
From Cities to Bioregions
A Bioregional Approach to Wellbeing
Hearth Summit Aegean explores how villages, islands and cities are embedded within broader living systems shaped by land, water, culture, ecology and local economies.
Moving beyond administrative boundaries, the Summit approaches the Aegean islands as an interconnected bioregion shaped by interdependence, limits, resilience and possibility.
Through regeneration, place-based thinking and bioregioning practices, it examines how wellbeing can emerge through stronger relationships between people and place.
Wellbeing is shaped across systems.
What becomes possible when we truly listen to a place?
What can we learn from territories shaped by resilience?
What does it mean to live well today?
Why Santorini?
A living system of tensions, transitions & possibilities
Taking the Hearth Summit to Santorini is an intentional act.
Overtourism, water scarcity, ecosystem fragility, biodiversity loss and cultural strain are not abstract challenges here. They are daily realities shaping how communities live, adapt, and survive.
The Summit enters this landscape to explore these tensions as starting points — not problems to solve in isolation, but gateways to place-based transformation.
The Experience
An immersive 2.5-day journey
The Summit unfolds over two and a half days across multiple locations on the island of Santorini.
Designed as an immersive journey, it moves between dialogue, landscape and cultural experience, co-creation and proximity, inviting participants to engage intellectually, physically and emotionally with place.
Through conversations, workshops, artistic interventions and field experiences, the programme connects systems thinking with the lived realities of island life and the wider Cycladic region.
Learning from the Island
Conversations, debates and exchanges with local communities, practitioners, entrepreneurs and researchers
Art & Culture: A Way of Understanding
Installations, screenings, performances and collective cultural moments
From Ideas to Practice
Workshops, regenerative practices, designed sessions and place-based explorations
Who joins the Summit
A living ecosystem of voices
Local communities of the Cyclades & Santorini
Policymakers & public sector representatives
Researchers, startups & professionals
Artists & creative practitioners
Civil society organisation and philanthropic institutions representatives
Be part of Hearth Summit Aegean
Hearth Summit Aegean 2026 is an open invitation to step into a different way of thinking and experiencing.
We invite practitioners, community leaders, policymakers, and creatives to come together to explore and shape what it means to live and act regeneratively within place.