The Diplomat
Their Majesties the King and Queen of Spain will inaugurate the 9th International Congress of the Spanish Language (CILE), which will be held from 27 to 30 March in Cadiz, and which will be attended by some 300 participants from all over the Spanish-speaking world.
As announced yesterday by the Congress organisers, the opening ceremony will take place in the Gran Teatro Falla, and will also be attended by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares; the Director of the Cervantes Institute, Luis García Montero; and the Director of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) and President of the Association of Spanish Language Academies (Asale), Santiago Muñoz Machado.
The Congress should have been held in 2022, in the Peruvian city of Arequipa, but the situation of instability in Peru since the removal of the country’s president, Pedro Castillo, on 7 December 2022, led the Association of Spanish Language Academies to propose that the meeting be moved to Cádiz, something that was immediately accepted by the Spanish government.
The first International Congress of the Spanish Language was held in Zacatecas (Mexico) in 1997, and another Spanish city, Valladolid, hosted the second edition in 2001.
The Council of Ministers yesterday approved the urgent disbursement of 3,752,013.86 euros to contract the necessary services to enable the Cadiz meeting to be held.
It is expected that during the days of the Congress, some 300 congress participants will debate the reality of Spanish, its past, present and future, through presentations and debates that will take place in the Palacio de Congresos in Cadiz, as well as in other emblematic sites in the city.
The participants will be personalities from both sides of the Atlantic such as the writers Sergio Ramírez, winner of the Cervantes Prize 2017, and Gioconda Belli (Nicaragua), Fernando Iwasaki, Jorge Eduardo Benavides and Santiago Roncagliolo (Peru), Carlos Franz (Chile) and the Spaniards José Enrique Ruiz-Domenech, Enrique Vila-Matas, J.J. Armas Marcelo, Carmen Posadas and María Dueñas, among others.
Alongside these names, academics and specialists such as Lola Pons, as well as experts in other branches of knowledge, such as the Mexican anthropologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, winner of the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences, will also speak on issues such as identities and hybridisations, round trips and transcultural dialogues.
