Barcelona creates a research grant on Cervantes and his relationship with the city

Barcelona is the only real city described by Miguel de Cervantes in El Quijote, and it is also the setting for a part of the ingenious hidalgo's adventures. The Barcelona City Council has created the Miguel de Cervantes Creation and Research grant to study the relationship of this writer with the city. Endowed with 6,000 euros, the grant seeks to support researchers who study the influence of this author on Catalan culture, as well as the presence of Barcelona in his work.

The aid is a new modality of the Barcelona Crea grants, which the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona (Icub) awards annually to promote the development of artistic and research projects. In total, a total of eleven grants are awarded, divided into 15 modalities, and with an economic endowment of 6,000 euros, to support the processes prior to the production of artistic proposals ---such as conceptualization, research, documentation or writing--- in the modalities of literature, music, audiovisual, scripts, popular cultures, performing arts, visual arts and community creation, provided they have some relationship with Barcelona or its metropolitan area. The deadline for submitting proposals will remain open until March 21.

This year, the ICUB incorporates this new grant on Cervantine literature, history and heritage. In addition, the City Council has also announced that it will expand its cultural heritage on Cervantes with the acquisition of the sculpture of Don Quijote created by Juli González. The sculpture comes from the collection of the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC) and will be incorporated into the city's Sculpture Park as a tribute to the writer.

These initiatives are part of Barcelona's presidency of the Network of Cervantine Cities, a platform that brings together more than thirty municipalities from around the world linked to the life and work of Miguel de Cervantes. It includes Spanish cities such as Córdoba, Madrid or Alcalá de Henares, but also foreign ones such as Leuven (Belgium), Guanajuato (Mexico) or Montevideo (Uruguay).

This year, as the network's presiding city, Barcelona will host the annual meeting of this network on March 18 and 19, attended by political and technical representatives from almost all the cities that make up the network: from Seville, Valladolid, or Lisbon to Azul (Argentina) or Recife (Brazil). The political representatives will be received by the mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, the president of the network, José Manual Lucía Megías, and the director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luís García Montero, as well as by the academic Carme Riera, who will offer a presentation on Cervantes and Barcelona. During the meeting, new lines of action and collaboration projects between the participating cities will be debated to study and disseminate the Cervantine heritage.