The Diplomat
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez; the President of the Autonomous Community of La Rioja, Concha Andreu; and the Director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, participated yesterday, in the monastery of Yuso in San Millán de la Cogolla, in the presentation of the center that will promote the PERTE New Economy of Language .
During the meeting, García Montero and Andreu signed, in the presence of Pedro Sánchez, the agreement to collaborate in the development of the Global Observatory of Spanish, which was also signed online by the Vice President and Minister of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, Nadia Calviño, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares.
The Observatory, which will work under the leadership of the Cervantes Institute, was approved on June 7 by the Council of Ministers, at the proposal of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Economic Affairs. The organization, based in La Rioja, will serve as a guide for the Cervantes Institute in the promotion of the language in the world and will be chaired by José Manuel Albares.
Under the agreement signed yesterday, the Ministry of Economic Affairs undertakes to support the Observatory “to strengthen the Spanish language in the digital space, with special emphasis on Artificial Intelligence”, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will process before the Ministry of Finance the file to provide the Observatory with human resources, will propose a budget item of 1,147,000 euros in the General State Budget 2023 to cover staff costs, meetings and technical equipment and will make available to the Observatory the network of Embassies and cultural centers of Spain.
For its part, the Community of La Rioja will provide a permanent physical headquarters for the Observatory and will support it financially through the Valle de la Lengua (Valley of the Language) project, and the Instituto Cervantes will carry out the organizational tasks and will program and execute the Observatory’s action plans, coordinate it with its network of centers abroad to disseminate its activity and propose to the Permanent Executive Committee the lines of work and collaboration agreements.
“I would like, since I am here, in San Millán de la Cogolla, to announce the creation of an Intelligence Center or Hub of the New Economy of Language,” declared Pedro Sánchez during the event, which took place in the monastery of Yuso on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the declaration of San Millán de la Cogolla as a World Heritage Site.
The purpose of this center, he continued, is to promote “a public-private ecosystem of innovation around the language, around Spanish and the other co-official languages, and to promote an incubator of business projects based on language technologies in Spanish”. To this end, according to Moncloa, the new center aims to generate collaboration networks with universities and international research centers for the transfer of knowledge, with specific initiatives to promote the development of the business fabric and digital entrepreneurship.
For all these reasons, Pedro Sánchez announced that his government is going to allocate “more than 20 million euros” to the Strategic Project for the Recovery and Economic Transformation (PERTE) New Economy of the Language, which will join the “more than 24 million euros that the Government of the Autonomous Community of La Rioja is going to contribute”.
This means, he said, “a total of 44 million euros to make this Valle de la Lengua take off, a new route that will put La Rioja on the cultural map with the same force that it already does with its routes through vineyards and wineries, and which will create employment, promote business opportunities and attract tourism and cultural industries”. El Valle de la Lengua is a joint strategic project of the regional government and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to promote the language as an element of development and tourist attraction. Among its main measures, the project proposes the creation of a technological platform for face-to-face or virtual Spanish language learning, the promotion of language tourism in the so-called “cradle of Spanish” and the creation of a digital business park around the language.
The PERTE New Economy of Language was approved by the Council of Ministers on March 1, 2022 with the aim of promoting the use of Spanish in artificial intelligence, science and culture, and favoring its teaching and learning. It has a budget of 1.1 billion euros in public investment. Former Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Ibero-America Cristina Gallach serves as Special Commissioner for the Alliance for a New Language Economy.
