The Diplomat The Ministers of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, and Culture, Ernest Urtasun, yesterday launched a message of support for cultural plurality and digital transformation, during their speech at the closing of the Meeting of Directors of the Cervantes Institute, held throughout this week at Barcelona City Council. Urtasun remembered the recently deceased Francisco Rico, a professor "to whom we owe - he said - the approach to Don Quixote through his wise gaze" and the writer Rosa Regàs, for whom he pointed out that culture was "a way of understanding the commitment to life". For the Minister of Culture, the Cervantes Institute is the place "where this understanding becomes more evident", since it is "a public institution that is a reference for our linguistic heritage and the dissemination abroad of our culture." country". For his part, José Manuel Albares, who could not be present in person at the closing, thanked Cervantes in a video for his work, which he defined as "the best tool to universally promote the use of Spanish," since the institute's task It is "of enormous importance and contributes decisively to strengthening our role in the world."In addition to highlighting the good figures of Cervantes in terms of certification and number of students/hour, the Minister of Foreign Affairs praised the work of promoting co-official languages, "because they are part - he stated - of the cultural wealth of Spain." Albares announced that the expansion of the Cervantes network will become a reality with the upcoming official inauguration of a center in the capital of South Korea, Seoul, currently Aula Cervantes. The Councilor for Culture of the Barcelona City Council, Xavier Marcé, celebrated the presence of the Cervantes Institute in Barcelona and asked for "a more robust proposal" regarding cultural diversity, highlighting the commitment of the Catalan capital to the multilingual reality. Luis García Montero, director of the Cervantes Institute, indicated that the presence in Barcelona of the directors of the centers was to highlight the cultural and linguistic diversity of the State, and to affirm Barcelona as "great capital of Catalan culture and one of the great of culture in Spanish". In response to Marcé's request, García Montero stressed his commitment to "strengthen the commitment to linguistic diversity and Catalan," and stated that Cervantes defends "diversity as a democratic wealth." The director of the institution extolled the value of culture, "a fundamental good," he said, "that makes us aware of everything that fits into words, therein lies the history of each community and the experience of each person when it comes to “establish links with mother tongues and the hope of creating a common good.” Likewise, Carmen Noguero, general secretary of the Institute, highlighted the permanent tension that Cervantes experiences between globalization and the particularities of each center, which is why "we work on the ground and that is what characterizes us," she stated. The profound digital transformation that the institution is experiencing has been the main protagonist of many of the work sessions, a change that "is not a technological layer, but a transformation of how we work," concluded Noguera. To conclude, García Montero stressed the importance of having at the meeting the sister reference of institutions with "a very close relationship" in Mexico, Colombia and Peru — which will host the International Congress of the Spanish Language in the city of Arequipa in 2025 — and learn how they address multilingualism and interculturality. As the last official act, the Ramon Llull Institute was presented, with the interventions of its director, Pere Almeda, and those responsible for the Language and Universities Area, Josep-Anton Fernàndez, of the Creation Area, Maria Lladó, and of the Literature Area and Thought, Joan de Sola. The Institut Ramon Llull has collaborated with the Cervantes since 2004, the year in which they signed their first collaboration agreement to support, together with the institutions that promote Basque and Galician languages and cultures—the Etxepare and the Consello da Cultura Galega, respectively, the linguistic diversity of Spain and respect for its multicultural reality through dialogue and understanding.
