Spanish culture arrives in Brussels this week with the 30th edition of the Europalia festival

Eduardo González Starting this Wednesday, October 8, Brussels will host the 30th edition of the Europalia international arts festival, one of the most important cultural events in Europe, with Spain as a guest country. For this occasion, King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia will visit the EU capital this Tuesday to attend the opening ceremony of the festival, which will take place between October 8 and February 1, 2026, and which will dedicate its programming to promoting the richness of Spanish culture in Belgium. In the morning, King Felipe and Queen Letizia will be received at the Royal Palace by the King and Queen of Belgium, who will offer them a private lunch. In the afternoon, they will travel to the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (Bozar Museum), where they will tour the exhibition "Light and Shadow. Goya and Spanish Realism" and attend the opening ceremony. The Europalia 2025/2026 festival includes a multidisciplinary cultural program encompassing visual and performing arts, music, film, and literature. “Light and Shadow. Goya and Spanish Realism,” the festival's main exhibition, will be open from October 8 to January 11 and will bring together Goya's own paintings, drawings, and prints alongside works by his contemporaries and later generations (such as José Gutiérrez Solana, Pablo Picasso, Antonio Saura, among others), as well as new multidisciplinary proposals by artists such as Asunción Molinos Gordo (visual artist), Francisco López (sound artist), and Albert Serra (filmmaker), as well as contemporary Spanish and Belgian writers. “With his fierce and gripping depictions of the injustice, abuse, and horrors of his time, Goya was pivotal in the development of a modernism firmly anchored in the Spanish realist tradition. Seventy artists, from the 18th century to the present, confront Goya's expressive complexity and demonstrate how his formal, conceptual, and ideological legacy continues to intrigue, move, and inspire,” state the organizers. The program also includes major performances, such as "Afanador" by the Spanish National Ballet, the National Drama Center's co-production "1936," directed by Andrés Lima, and the production "El maleficio de la mariposa" by the Ballet Flamenco de Andalucía. The curatorial project for Europalia España 2025 includes artists of all generations, from established to emerging figures, from all over Spain. In total, the event includes more than 200 activities, including around ten exhibitions, more than 20 proposals focused on visual and plastic art, 40 musical activities, 70 performing arts projects, 50 film screenings, 30 initiatives on literature and thought, and 20 proposals from other disciplines. This program is co-organized by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, through the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), with the main collaboration of Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), and the support of the Instituto Cervantes, the Ministry of Culture, and the Commissioner for the Celebration of 50 Years of Spain in Freedom, institutional partners of this event, in addition to various Belgian institutions. The Europalia festival has been organized every two years since 1969 with the aim of bringing the culture of a guest country closer to the Belgian public, and the European public in general, through a wide range of artistic disciplines: visual arts, performing arts, music, film, literature, and debates. This year marks exactly forty years since the first edition of Europalia dedicated to Spain.

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