The Diplomat
The Instituto Cervantes will hold its Annual Meeting of Directors on December 20-22 in San Sebastian (Guipuzcoa).
The event will bring together more than 70 directors, both from the centers around the world and from the central headquarters in Madrid. According to the Instituto Cervantes, this will be the first time that this meeting will take place in the Basque Country. Likewise, with this meeting these regular working meetings will resume, which until now were always organized in July and which in 2020 could not be held due to the health situation (the last one was in the summer of 2019). The sessions will take place mainly in the San Sebastian building of Tabakalera, the well-known international center of contemporary culture in the city.
The inauguration will take place on Monday, December 20, at 11:30 a.m., in an event open to the media in which the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, and the Minister of Culture and spokesperson of the Basque Government, Bingen Zuripia, will participate, and to which Queen Letizia has been invited. Previously there will be a press conference by the director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, and other Basque authorities.
Throughout the three days, closed-door working sessions will analyze issues such as the situation of the institution, the challenges it has faced and continues to face due to the successive waves of COVID-19 in the 45 countries in which the institution is present and the most successful strategies for the coming years, with a special focus on digitization. Sixty directors of Cervantes centers (who in turn are responsible for the Cervantes classrooms and the smaller Cervantes extensions) will participate, as well as a dozen people in charge of the Institute’s headquarters in Madrid.
Also on the program is the presentation of a legacy to the Caja de las Letras by the actress Ángela Molina. The event will take place at the Basque Film Library, located in Tabakalera, and the personal legacy will be collected by Luis García Montero for subsequent deposit in the vault at the Instituto Cervantes’ headquarters in Madrid.
Previous annual meetings of directors of the Institute were held in A 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 (La Rioja, 2014), Santiago de Compostela (2015), Madrid (2016), Málaga (2017), Orihuela and Alicante (2018) and El Escorial (Madrid, 2019).
