The world awarded by Spain deserves more attention in Spain

In Spain, the exemplary relevance and magnificent speeches of those who are awarded the Princess of Asturias Awards are being poorly disseminated and are being misused. The most emblematic that Spain grants in the world. An initiative that for four decades has placed Spain identified with the front line of excellence without borders, and committed to the best values ​​to govern the world. The Princess of Asturias Awards are not the preserve of the King and his heiress. They are not a program of Spanish Television. They are the Spanish Awards. Whether they are granted to the creators of the internet, to Nelson Mandela, to the architects of the first vaccines against covid, to Paco de Lucía, or to Woody Allen, or to Les Luthiers. Every year, the level of all the people and entities chosen to receive such a distinction is usually sensational. Much better than the Nobel Prizes, undoubtedly the most prestigious, but whose regulations are so anachronistic that they do not allow most of the fields that are crucial in today’s knowledge society to be included in their list. But in Spain there are many interests and desires to confine the dimension of ours to the Asturian sphere, as if they were an autonomous contest with a monarchical aftertaste. If this approach is taken subliminally, then it goes without saying that it is correct to devote little attention to them, and justify yourself with a dressing task to cover the file.

In the 2022 edition, personalities who are world leaders in their role, such as the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, have been in Oviedo to receive their award. He really is an ‘influencer’. Instead of making a fortune making extravagant and wasteful architecture, he has chosen to apply his talent to devising imaginative and at the same time rigorous models of sustainable buildings made with recycled materials to solve the needs of many millions of people fleeing from catastrophes and wars, and for Therefore, as victims or refugees inside or outside their country, they are exposed to tremendous difficulties that become lasting. Shigeru Ban is both the epitome of humility and a beacon that illuminates how another world is possible where the scale of values ​​appropriately places priorities far ahead of witty claims. Do we want our children and grandchildren to be like the unknown Shigeru Ban or like the well-known Tamara Falcó?

One of the great successes of the Princess of Asturias Foundation when it organizes the award ceremony each year in Oviedo at the Campoamor Theater is knowing how to guide the winners chosen beforehand to deliver speeches so that they can prepare brief interventions aimed at citizens as a whole in a broadcast via television and the internet. That the solemnity of the event does not induce them to expose their ideas with a focus for scholars, neither in substance nor in form. The award-winning talents adequately capture the simple indication and the result, each year, is a sum of three or four farsighted, fascinating, emotional speeches. At the same time height of sights and level of general society. The best on this occasion has been, in my opinion, that of the great Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga, winner of the Prize for Letters. I recommend that you look it up on the internet and enjoy it. It’s only seven minutes. They should put it in every home with children. And in all schools. I’ll give you a hint, this is how it starts:

“One rainy evening, my daughter Raquel, then very small, approached her brothers, Miguel and Beatriz, who were drawing on a white sheet of paper. ‘What are you doing?’ The letters. ‘All?’ All. That was a huge discovery for Raquel, who did not know how to read, but she does write with letters, and she did not imagine that there were not an infinite number of them, much less that there were so few. She had already heard many words, and it turned out that all of them could be made with that handful of signs. That is why she was looking at the white sheet in fascination as if it were a magical place.”