This paper addresses the solution of timetabling problems using cultural algorithms. The core idea is to extract problem domain information during the evolutionary search, and then combine it with some previously proposed operators, in order to improve performance. The proposed approach is validated using a benchmark of 20 instances, and its results are compared with respect to three other approaches: two evolutionary algorithms and simulated annealing, all of which have been previously adopted to solve timetabling problems. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.