Eduardo González
Queen Letizia will participate this week in Barcelona at the Annual Meeting of Directors of the Instituto Cervantes, the first to be held in Catalonia and in which the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Culture, José Manuel Albares and Ernest Urtasun, will also participate.
The meeting will be held between July 22 and 25 in Barcelona and will bring together more than 80 officials from the Institute, including the management team in Spain and directors of centers abroad. The meeting agenda includes internal closed-door sessions, round tables and conferences.
The opening ceremony will be held today, Monday, in the Saló de Cent of the Barcelona City Hall with words from the director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero; the mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, and the delegate of the Government in Catalonia, Carlos Prieto Gómez.
As a prior step to this Annual Meeting of Directors, the director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, and the mayor of the city, Jaume Collboni, signed a collaboration agreement on June 25, which includes the development of joint activities and projects that allow the cultural richness and diversity of Barcelona to be shown at the headquarters and centers of the Instituto Cervantes abroad, as well as the holding and development of the Directors' Meeting at the City Hall facilities.
Prior to the inauguration, the secretary general of the Organization of Ibero-American States, Mariano Jabonero, will give a talk on the dissemination of Ibero-American culture.
On the same Monday afternoon, the Secretary of State for Ibero-America and the Caribbean and Spanish in the World, Susana Sumelzo, and the general director of Spanish in the World, Guillermo Escribano, will speak.
Tomorrow, Tuesday, will begin with a work session chaired by the Queen at Barcelona City Hall, which will be titled 'Facets of plurilingualism'. Accompanying Doña Letizia, in addition to García Montero, will be Carlos Prieto Gómez, delegate of the Government in Catalonia; Mayor Jaume Collboni, Lluïsa Moret i Sabidó, president of the Barcelona Provincial Council and Salvador Illa, current head of the acting opposition of Catalonia.
García Montero will act as moderator for the directors of Cervantes in Naples (Italy), Budapest (Hungary), Vienna (Austria) and Dakar (Senegal), who will briefly present the situation of the institution and our language in the corresponding countries. The Queen is expected to later hold an informal meeting with the directors of the Instituto Cervantes.
On the same Tuesday, the presentation of the Cervantes Cities Network will take place, led by José Manuel Lucía Megías, professor of Romance Philology at the Complutense University of Madrid.
Wednesday's day will begin with a work session at the University of Barcelona dedicated to multilingualism in the Peninsula, will continue with a speech by José Manuel Albares and will conclude with the presentation of the Abertis Foundation at its headquarters in Castellet Castle, in the municipality of the same name.
The last day of the Meeting, on Thursday, July 25, will begin at Barcelona City Hall with the round table 'Multilingualism and native languages' and will continue with the presentation of the conclusions of the 2024 Annual Meeting of Directors to the media, carried out by Luis García Montero, the general secretary of the Instituto Cervantes, Carmen Noguero, and Ernest Urtasun.
This is the first time that the Annual Meeting of the Instituto Cervantes is held in Catalonia. Since 2005, they have been developed 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, the Basque Country, the Valencian Community and the Principality of Asturias.
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