The Diplomat
The Queen will inaugurate today in Granada the Annual Meeting of Directors of the Instituto Cervantes, which will bring together more than seventy directors of the institution from around the world until December 21.
The Queen Letizia will preside over the opening ceremony, which will be attended by the director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero; the rector of the University of Granada, Pilar Aranda Ramírez; the mayor of the city, Francisco Cuenca; and the State Secretary for Ibero-America, the Caribbean and Spanish in the World, Juan Fernández Trigo. For his part, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, will intervene by videoconference in the concluding session, to be held on Wednesday in the Plenary Hall of the Granada City Hall.
On Monday, after the aforementioned institutional interventions before the Queen, a panel of directors will open with a dialogue between the heads of four centers spread over four continents: Beijing (Isabel Cervera), Rabat (José María Martínez), Sydney (Coral Martínez Íscar) and Los Angeles (Luisgé Martín). The colloquium will close with a brief performance by the Orchestra and Choir of the University of Granada. Afterwards, and after signing the University’s book of honor, the Queen Letizia will hold an informal meeting with the Cervantes directors and guests.
Over the course of three days of work, the management team of the Instituto Cervantes in Spain and the directors of 61 centers will discuss the challenges facing the institution and strategies for the international dissemination of the Spanish language and the culture of Spanish-speaking countries. To this end, the conference will be organized in seven closed-door working sessions that will address topics such as the Institute’s academic and cultural activities, the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, the PERTE New Economy of the Language, the commercialization of online Spanish courses, collaborations with other institutions and artificial intelligence in Spanish.
The working sessions will conclude with a concluding session by Luis García Montero, the secretary general of the Instituto Cervantes, Carmen Noguero, and the mayor of Granada, as well as Minister Albares via videoconference. The last act will be the delivery of a legacy by the Granada singer Miguel Ríos to García Montero to be deposited in the Instituto Cervantes’ Caja de las Letras, which will close with a free concert by the artist at the Isabel La Católica Theater. In addition, the Cervantes directors’ program of cultural activities will include visits to emblematic sites of cultural interest, such as the Alhambra, Federico García Lorca’s birthplace in Fuente Vaqueros and the Garden of the Poets at Carmen de los Mártires.
This is the third time that an Annual Meeting of Directors is held in Andalusia, after those developed in Cordoba (in 2007) and Malaga (2017). This type of periodic meetings have taken place every year since 2005 (except in 2020 because of the pandemic) in various cities in a total of ten autonomous communities: Andalusia, Castilla y León, Castilla-La Mancha, Madrid, Cantabria, Extremadura, La Rioja, Galicia, the Basque Country and the Valencian Community.
