The University of Salamanca, 800 Years Later

Quoting any city, then it is associated to a particular image from the Guggenheim in Bilbao to Barcelona in Barcelona. What is associated Salamanca?

Years ago, there was no doubt to the University. Today, I'm sorry, but questioned the stranger thinks it a good time rather than admit ignorance. And is that the University has become a strange and foreign element, which some tourists only remember his search for the frog in front of larger schools.

The University, its environment, student life and to the cultural impregnation it is supposed to have disappeared from the urban center with its distance to campus Miguel de Unamuno. He rightly reminded recently Professor Isabel Nieto in a television talk show in which we agree: the university today is only an appendix almost forgotten by the public.

These thoughts come to mind on the task ahead for Professor Carlos Palomeque as coordinator of the eighth centenary of the University.

On the one hand, of course, is the international event, such as claims, among other things, to rejuvenate the old withered laurels, perhaps, of our antañona academic institution. Now that the Pan Bologna has helped to unite the university and to blur their differences in a crowded global academic world, to demonstrate, promote and celebrate the uniqueness of our University is a sine qua non to ensure its future.

But there's more. Part of this differentiation, this attractive and that claim would be that the whole city was a college campus, a situation far removed from today's reality. Get it, or at least try to approach it-is a daunting task for Palomeque and his team. But no other. If the University is not embedded in the city if the city embraces its university, the future of both is more than bleak. Salamanca, without the university, is nothing, and the University, without the receptacle of the city beautiful, is comparable to any other of yesterday, housed in conventional concrete buildings.