The Diplomat in Spain

Casa Mediterráneo’s headquarters in Alicante.

The Diplomat. 23/07/2018

Cervantes Institute’s Annual Meeting of Directors will gather together this week in the towns of Orihuela and Alicante the heads of the institution in Spain and those of 60 centers around the world, in what is the premiere of Luis García Montero as the head of this institution.

More than 70 senior officials of the Cervantes Institute will set the lines of international promotion of the Spanish language and culture for the next academic year. The meeting will take place, among other venues, in Casa Mediterráneo.

The inauguration will take place today at Santo Domingo de Orihuela School. The rest of the sessions on Monday and Tuesday will continue in this city, while those on Wednesday and Thursday will be held in Alicante. The meeting is organized with the sponsorship of the City Council of Orihuela, Alicante’s Provincial Government and Casa Mediterráneo.

The election of Orihuela, the native town of poet Miguel Hernández (1910-1942), is part of the celebration of the Hernandian Year, in which the Cervantes Institute collaborates. In this annual meeting will be agreed new actions related to the 75th anniversary of the death of the poet. This will be one of the outstanding issues of the Cervantes’ conclave. The cultural plan and the process of Iberoamericanization of the organism is also scheduled.

In this sense, progress will be made in this line started in 2012 by which the Spanish-speaking countries cooperate in the international dissemination of the shared language and culture. The latter will be discussed in a specific work session dedicated to Ibero-America in which, in addition to Luis García Montero, will participate the Director of the Center for Mexican Studies in Spain (CEM-Spain) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Andrés Ordoñez; the Delegate of Caro y Cuervo Institute (Colombia) in Spain, Martín Gómez; and the Executive Director of the Inca Garcilaso Cultural Center (Peru), Alonso José Ruiz Rosas.

Along four days there will be nine closed-door work sessions that will study several sectorial issues: culture, academia, Digital Plan, communication and human resources, among other topics. One of the sessions will be dedicated to language tourism, in which the Valencian Community and the province of Alicante offer great potential to attract foreign Spanish students eager to learn the language in an environment with other attractions such as good weather, beach and culture.

In the session dedicated to the teaching of Spanish, the Academic Director, Ricardo Bueno, will present the last year’s report and brief on the most relevant ongoing projects. Among them, the SICELE Association, the collaboration with ALTE, the adaptation of the DELE-A2 diploma to the profiles of new candidates and the new competency certificate for teachers of Spanish as a foreign language.

This is the first time that a Directors Meeting is held in the Valencian Community. Previously, they were staged in La Coruña (2005), León (2006), Córdoba (2007), Soria (2008), Comillas (Cantabria, 2009), Alcázar de San Juan (Ciudad Real, 2010), Alcalá de Henares (Madrid) , 2011), Salamanca (2012), Cáceres and Mérida (2013), Logroño and San Millán de la Cogolla (2014), Santiago de Compostela (2015), Madrid (2016) and Malaga (2017).