Eduardo González
The Instituto Cervantes will hold this week its Annual Meeting of Directors, which will bring together nearly 80 heads of the institution in Spain and abroad and in which Queen Letizia will participate tomorrow.
The meeting will be held from December 18 to 20 in Asturias, specifically in Oviedo, Gijón and Avilés. This is the first time that the Annual Meeting of Directors of the Instituto Cervantes will be held in Asturias. Since 2005 they have been held uninterruptedly (except in 2020 due to 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, Basque Country and the Valencian Community.
The opening ceremony will be held today at the Teatro de La Laboral in Gijón, with remarks by the director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, and the government delegate in Asturias, Delia Losa Carballido. The event will be followed by a performance by the Asturian artist Lorena Álvarez and, in the afternoon, a lecture by Santiago Herrero, director of Cultural and Scientific Relations of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID).
The working sessions will be held in Gijón (Monday), Avilés (Tuesday) and Oviedo (Wednesday). They will be attended by the institution’s management team in Spain (thirteen area directors or deputy directors) and the directors of a total of 63 centers around the world. The agenda of the Instituto Cervantes executives includes a total of seven closed-door working meetings that will focus on issues such as the Digital Transformation Plan, academic activity, the cultural agenda, commercial promotion and the presentation of the Yo hablo español (I speak Spsnish) platform.
Tomorrow, Tuesday, will take place at the Oscar Niemeyer International Cultural Center in Avilés. The main event will be the working session, which will be chaired by the Queen. Doña Letizia will be accompanied by the president of the Principality, Adrián Barbón, the director of Cervantes, Luis García Montero; the general secretary of the Institute, Carmen Noguero; the Asturian deputy minister of Culture, Language Policy and Sport, Ana Vanesa Gutiérrez, and the mayoress of Avilés, Virtudes Monteserín.
García Montero will act as moderator for the directors of the centers in Bremen (Germany), Bucharest (Romania), Warsaw (Poland) and Brasilia (Brazil), who will briefly present the situation of the institution and of our language in their respective countries. Afterwards, the Queen is expected to hold an informal meeting with the directors of the Instituto Cervantes.
The finale of the day in Avilés will be provided by the Asturian singer-songwriter Víctor Manuel, who will deliver a legacy to García Montero so that, upon his return to Madrid, he can deposit it in the Caja de las Letras at the Instituto Cervantes’ headquarters. The Asturian artist will give an acoustic performance in the auditorium of the Niemeyer Center, which will be open to the public with prior registration.
The work on Wednesday the 20th will take place in Oviedo and will include the presentation, at the University of Oviedo, of the report on the current state of the corpus in Spanish. After the greetings from García Montero and the rector, the special commissioner for the Alliance for the New Economy of Language, Cristina Gallach, and the director of the Global Observatory of Spanish, Francisco Moreno, will intervene in the Aula Magna.
