The Diplomat
The Secretary of State for International Cooperation, Ángeles Moreno Bau, ended last Friday a two-day working trip to Paris during which the possibility of jointly commemorating the 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso and even taking advantage of this event to help revive tourism after the crisis generated by the pandemic.
According to the Secretary of State, Ángeles Moreno Bau met in the French capital with the Secretary of State for Tourism, French Abroad and Francophony, Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, and with the general director of the French Development Agency (AFD, the equivalent of the Spanish AECID), Rémy Rioux, with a view to coordinating and sharing development strategies, especially on priority issues such as migration and development in the Maghreb, West Africa and the Sahel, the digitization of education and the vaccination program against HIV/AIDS in developing countries.
Moreno Bau also maintained an intense agenda of cultural cooperation that included a visit to the headquarters of the Instituto Cervantes in Paris, which this year celebrates its thirtieth anniversary and has “four emblematic centers in Bordeaux (where Goya lived and died), Toulouse (capital of the Republican exile), Lyon and Paris”; and attendance, at the residence of the Embassy of Spain, to the presentation of the Universo Miró exhibition, a traveling exhibition by European legations as a result of an agreement between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Miró and Abertis Foundations.
The trip concluded with a visit to the Picasso Museum in Paris and an interview with its director, Laurent Le Bon, in which the possibility of organizing, in 2023, a joint commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the death of the painter from Malaga was raised.
As reported by the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, Moreno Bau and Lemoyne discussed possible joint actions in the field of culture and the prospects for bilateral cooperation in the tourism sector, “whose revival is a priority”. In this regard, the two Secretaries of State expressed their wish that the cultural events scheduled for 2023 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso could culminate in the joint organization of tourist itineraries linking the various places where the painter lived, in France and in Spain.
