The Diplomat
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, received yesterday at the Palacio de Viana, in Madrid, the President of the Government of La Rioja, Concha Andreu, with the aim of jointly promoting the Language Valley (Valle de la Lengua) initiative, a project of the Government of La Rioja to promote the language as an element of development and tourist attraction.
During the meeting, the two parties discussed possible lines of collaboration “to promote the Language Valley and other strategic projects of the Transformation Plan of La Rioja”, as reported by the regional president through her Twitter account. “Meeting with the president of La Rioja, Concha Andreu, to discuss the Language Valley project”. Albares declared through the same social network. “Together with the Instituto Cervantes, we are working on this valuable project with one of our greatest assets, Spanish, a universal language”, he added.
The president of La Rioja already addressed these possible avenues of collaboration on June 30, when she met with Albares’ predecessor, Arancha González Laya, to “deepen the international dimension of the Language Valley”. That meeting took place just two weeks before the ministerial handover.
The objective of the Language Valley, one of the strategic projects that form the backbone of the Transformation Plan of La Rioja, is to take advantage of the importance of the Spanish language as a source of growth. Among its main measures, the project proposes the creation of a technological platform for learning Spanish in person or online, the promotion of language tourism in the so-called “cradle of Spanish”, the monasteries of San Millán de la Cogolla (World Heritage Site), and the implementation of a digital business park based on the language.
On May 17, Andreu met in Madrid with the director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, to discuss possible avenues of collaboration. Likewise, on June 23, the President of La Rioja and the Ibero-American Secretary General, Rebeca Grynspan, signed a collaboration protocol to promote the project through a series of joint actions that will allow the potential of Spanish as a tool for territorial development and as a vehicle for strengthening ties with the Ibero-American and Spanish-speaking community as a whole to be deployed.
