Creative tourism is increasingly discussed as a pathway for tourism development in rural and peripheral destinations, yet empirical evidence remains uneven and is still drawn mainly from contexts where it is already explicitly labelled and institutionally supported. This article examines whether and how creative tourism-aligned practices are present in Kupiškis District, a peripheral rural municipality in north-eastern Lithuania where creative tourism has not been formally institutionalised as a tourism development category. The study adopts a qualitative single-case design combining a multi-stakeholder focus group and semi-structured interviews with municipal, intermediary, and private-sector actors. The findings reveal a meaningful but weakly integrated experiential base shaped by educational activities, water-based leisure, symbolic narratives, routes, and micro-entrepreneurial initiatives. Although these practices are rarely named locally as creative tourism, they display several of its defining characteristics, including participatory learning, host involvement, small-scale interaction, and local embeddedness. The study suggests that the main development challenge lies not in the absence of creative resources, but in limited coordination, weak articulation, and the difficulty of translating dispersed practices into coherent and consistently bookable visitor experiences. The article conceptualises this condition as a latent experiential portfolio and, in doing so, makes three contributions: it offers a sensitising concept for describing pre-consolidation stages of creative tourism where relevant practices exist but remain only partly articulated; it supports a practice-based rather than label-based identification of creative tourism in weakly institutionalised settings; and it extends the empirical scope of creative tourism research to a peripheral rural case in the Baltic region.
Gulbovaitė et al. (Sat,) studied this question.