The Government Delegation hosted on Thursday the presentation of the national literary festival ‘5 nights, Cinco Villas’. A meeting that was attended by the subdelegate of the Government of Aragon, Noelia Herrero, the president of the region of Cinco Villas, Santos Navarro, and the president of the Creative Spain association, Belén Elisa Díaz.
Along with them, the mayors of the five municipalities where this literary festival will take place in May have been present: Armando Soria (Urriés), Ezequiel Marco (Biota); Teresa Pueyo (Uncastillo), José Antonio Navarro (Sáabas) and María José Navarro (Sos del Rey Catlico).
This new festival, which is co-organized by the Creative Spain association and the Cinco Villas region, will host different proposals, such as a contest of stories, poetry and documentaries of legends, whose public call is open until March 31, endowed with 10,000 euros in prizes, can be downloaded here: https://www.comarcacincovillas.es/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/convocatoria-y-anexo-participacion-festival-literario.pdf
In addition, there will be literary creation workshops, with prominent writers such as Espid Freire and the poet, Olga Novo, among others, and evenings in the five Cinco-Villesa localities where it will be held: Urriés -10 May-; Uncastillo -11 May-; Sos del Rey Catlico -18 May-; Biota -24 May- and Sáabas -25 May-.
All these localities have been chosen to meet the requirements established by the call for grants from the Ministry of Culture that finance this proposal, among them, being at extreme risk of depopulation, having a relevant historical and cultural heritage and dynamic libraries. Although, from the region of Cinco Villas it is expected that this will be only the first edition of the festival, and that it will rotate municipalities in coming years.
The promotion of the literary festival ‘5 nights Cinco villas’ is part of a broader project, the presentation of Creative Rural, a project of the Creative Spain association and which has proved to be the project best valued (with 99 of 100 possible points) in the grants for the Territorial Transformation and Demographic Challenge 2023, among the more than 1,000 projects presented from all over Spain by the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge.
The National literary festival ‘5 Nights Cinco Villas’ is part of this project. It will promote the reading and literary creativity of children, young people and elderly people in the rural world and to value their intangible heritage as a key resource to address the serious problem of abandonment and depopulation suffered by most of our peoples, thus contributing to their sustainable development.
Literary creation
The subdelegate in the province of Zaragoza, Noelia Herrero, highlighted the commitment of the Government of Spain to the most depopulated areas and the “cultural power” of the municipalities. “An ambitious plan of 130 measures is being developed in response to the demographic challenge, taking into account that territorial cohesion is a country challenge that requires an integrative vision from the State,” he said, specifying that this is a challenge “that falls to municipalities of all sizes, since they are all part of the solution.”
The president of the region of Cinco Villas, Santos Navarro, has expressed that to make the rural world known “we must bet on initiatives of this type, and we believe that supporting them from the institutions is the first thing we have to promote, because the region works for citizens and offer culture, which is a universal right, is a priority”.
“The fact that we live few people does not mean that these municipalities are not worthy of access to this type of proposal, since they have a great heritage and historical legacy, and because their libraries are tremendously active. Many of them, even recognized with regional and state awards. Having such an infrastructure has been another of the differentiating elements that have made us worthy of this project,” said President Cincovillés. It has also highlighted “the promotion at the national level that this festival represents, as well as a tourist attraction for all our municipalities”.
For her part, Belén Elisa Díaz considered that, from the organization, “we want to meet the objectives foreseen in the program of animation to reading in the rural world. In particular, we hope to mobilize and empower the local population of the 31 municipalities that make up the region of the Cinco Villas, as well as the other towns of Spain with less than 5,000 inhabitants.”
With this festival “we seek to rescue the talent of the peoples and safeguard their soul, immersing ourselves in their intangible heritage and putting it in value, sensitizing the population of the importance of reading and the development of their creative capacity to promote a reading democracy that reaches the most vulnerable groups and democratizes the culture beyond the big cities, betting on a diffuse creativity that goes beyond these poles of creation concentrated in the big cities and generating new dynamics of relationship between the rural and urban world”.