Three and a half years after its creation, the organization promoted by Isabel Díaz Ayuso to protect and defend Spanish from the Community of Madrid has definitively been left without a director. The Spanish Office, which already lost autonomy a year ago, is diluted into the Ministry of Culture after the dismissal of its last head, José Ramiro Alonso de Villapadierna. The regional Executive allocates around 200,000 euros annually to its activity, according to official sources from the regional Government.
This organization was created in June 2021. It served as shelter for Toni Cantó, after he was left off the PP lists in the regional elections in May for not being registered in Madrid. Ayuso placed the actor, who had just left Ciudadanos, in charge of this project that was created ad hoc for him, with an annual salary of 75,000 euros.
The Madrid president defended the creation of this institution, arguing that it would help “the country’s capital to promote the language” at a time when, according to her, Spanish as a language is being “attacked and hidden.” However, three and a half years later, the most recent data from the Cervantes Institute dismantles this theory: Spanish continues to be the second language with the most native speakers, only behind Mandarin Chinese.
For the first time, in fact, Spanish speakers exceed 600 million people, with 24 million students, a group that, according to the 2024 yearbook of the institution chaired by Luis García Montero, increases “at an average rate of 2% and still has a wide margin for growth.” Furthermore, according to this study, the presence of Spanish in countries like the United States has not stopped growing, doubling in two decades the percentage of Hispanic voters, going from 7.4% in 2000 to 14.7% in 2024.
Despite not having work experience in cultural diplomacy, Cantó took charge of this project. His appointment was criticized by the opposition, which described the new office as a “chiringuito” created to offer a position to the politician, who came to the PP supported by the leadership then led by Pablo Casado. Before Cantó had gone through Ciudadanos, UPyD and Vecinos por Torrelodones.
“The beach bar is what you see, it’s me. There is no other structure than me,” Cantó himself said in an interview after the controversy generated by his appointment. For her part, the president tried to distance herself from the criticism by stating that it was not a position tailored for the actor and that she had been announcing for two years that she would create a project for defend spanish. “I’m surprised that people look at it so much with a magnifying glass,” Ayuso lamented about the dust raised by the position awarded fingering the former Ciudadanos deputy.
With this office, the Community sought to position the region as a “world reference in Spanish in all areas.” Furthermore, this department aspired to be an interlocutor with “institutions to promote economic opportunities for Spanish.” During Cantó’s time, the organization signed agreements with the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE). In addition, he was part of the organizing committee of the Hispanidad festival, held around October 12, 2021. It was an event with a hundred activities funded with 850,000 euros, also of public money.
In an appearance at the Madrid Assembly, Cantó explained that his mission focused on meeting with the Hispanic embassies in the capital. Likewise, he recognized that “between 80% and 90% of the work carried out by the Office has to do with educational tourism”, focused on attracting Spanish students in the Community of Madrid. To do this, your institution signed an agreement with the Spanish Federation of Spanish School Associations of Madrid (Fedele), one of the few activities of the organization that appear in the archive of Community press releases.
The first agreement with Fedele did not involve any disbursement of public money. However, another ratified four months later for the positioning of the Community of Madrid as a Spanish language tourist destination involved an expense of 113,000 euros. A year and a half later, Madrid is one of the large communities that has recovered the fewest Spanish students compared to pre-pandemic levels. Furthermore, the 2023 sector report de Fedele warned that in the Community of Madrid “a flow of students is observed towards other areas of Spain”, especially towards “the Mediterranean coast”.
Cantó, 14 months in office
They also ratified agreements with the Complutense University, the Distance University of Madrid, the San Pablo-CEU University Foundation and the José Ortega y Gasset-Gregorio Marañón Foundation for the promotion of Spanish. This is stated in the information that the Community of Madrid provided to Vox in a parliamentary response. published by ‘Infobae‘. According to this medium, all these agreements were ratified in 2022. In 2023 this Office no longer signed any more agreements. And the impact of the aforementioned alliances is an enigma, since the Community has not made any public assessment of these agreements.
The representative of Más Madrid in the Culture Commission, Alicia Torija, assures that this project “has never had a basis” or “a strategy.” “When you create a project as if it were a beach bar and, in reality, you don’t have a real objective, you just wander around,” he explains, about some of the announcements made by this organization.
Cantó announced his departure 14 months after his appointment to join 7NN, a television network close to the extreme right that closed a few months later due to “excessive expenses.”
His replacement at the head of the Spanish Office was José Ramiro Alonso de Villapadierna, a journalist with a profile much more linked to cultural diplomacy than that of his predecessor in office. He was director of the Cervantes Institute in Frankfurt and Prague, cultural attaché at the embassies of Germany and the Czech Republic, according to information published by the Community of Madrid after his appointment. Before joining the Spanish Office, he was responsible for the Vargas Llosa Chair.
He came to office in December 2022 and has spent two years leading the defense of Spanish in the Community of Madrid, although throughout these months he has been losing responsibility. Upon assuming the direction of the institution, the cultural manager assured in an interview in The World that “this project” had “come to stay.” However, a year after its appointment, the office ceased to be an autonomous body and was integrated into the General Directorate of Cultural Heritage.
Villapadierna continued for another year in the organization chart of the Community of Madrid with a salary of 78,700 euros, according to official information from the Community of Madrid. However, he assures that he has earned 64,000 euros gross per year. His final dismissal occurred on December 10, as announced The Confidential. In 2023, his agenda included intense activity, with around twenty events in some months and trips to Switzerland, Salamanca, Cádiz or Alicante. However, in 2024 there are only two meetings: one with the Vargas Llosa chair and another with the Círculo Orellana association, according to the information published on the transparency portal. Villapadierna assures that only those two acts appear because the “office was not a high-ranking official and only high-ranking officials keep a public agenda of their activities.”
The former director of the office lists more than a dozen activities carried out during his mandate and that “are underway for the future,” such as “the first international seminar on miscegenation and decolonization” and the “first Spanish Olympics.” Official sources from the regional Executive assure that the Spanish Office has been present in the activities carried out within the framework of Science and Innovation Week, as well as in various festivals and the Black Legend Days.
The Ministry of Culture defends the activity of this office. A spokesperson for the regional government explains that this organization “has managed to make Madrid the headquarters of Spanish Week 2022 and will promote the 2026 edition to be held in Alcalá de Henares, it has promoted the creation of the Linguistic Competition for Madrid schoolchildren, which has already It has three editions and, in addition, it developed the El Sueño de Madrid project.”
The last director of this department gives a positive assessment of his management. Villapadierna explains to elDiario.es in a questionnaire answered in writing that this project “came perfectly suited to this new melting pot of Madrid and focus of international students, and that it arrived with a certain delay if possible; because cultural policy must be more of a medium and long-term project and vision than a mere window dressing of things and attractions.”
In relation to the disappearance as an independent entity, Villapadierna assures that the Spanish Office “did not lose autonomy.” “I have only found support in a Department [la de Cultura] very cohesive and very diverse,” he explains to this editorial team. Already diluted in the organization chart of the Community, the organization designed for Cantó has been framed in the General Directorate of Cultural Heritage and Office of Spanish directed by Bartolomé González Jiménez.
#Toni #Cantó #disappearance #short #life #Ayuso #Spanish #Office
