Catalonia OpenDoors
Dear friends,
We present to you the new project of our association: an annual 4-day event around April 23, Sant Jordi Day, the Day of the Rose and the Book in the Països Catalans. During these days, the country will open its doors to citizens from around the world who are interested in understanding and exploring the reality of Catalonia. To begin, we will center our activities this year in the Girona region.
It will be an opportunity to share Catalonia’s values, character, yearnings, struggles, geography, traditions, and possibilities through the most noble and innovative tool that we citizens have at our disposal: “Grass-Roots Diplomacy.”
We will make you participants, over the course of 4 days, in the soul of the Girona region: through university lectures, museums with open doors, discoveries from our historical heritage, routes through nature, and visits to points of industrial and technological relevance, as well as facilitating contacts and meetings within the civic, academic, artistic, literary and business spheres. Above all, we want to share with you the very nature–hospitable, ingenious, coordinated, and peaceful yet determined–that has always characterized the Catalan people, in one of the most authentic regions of our nation.
To make this possible, we have families from different parts of the Girona region who look forward to hosting you.
This way, each visitor only has to arrange his or her own travel to Catalonia.
In addition, as a ForeignFriend, you will enjoy an extensive social program with participation by a wide range of citizens.
Participating as a guest in Catalonia OpenDoors 2020 means taking part in an innovative human experience and event. It means enjoying the opportunity to get to know a country, not through the number of kilometers covered, but through the unique opportunity of living with its residents as guests in their homes. It means filling up a brief journey with meaning, thanks to the emotions that you experience as a result of your contact with local people
This human experience—of family, neighbors, and community who go out of their way to allow you to participate in their day-to-day lives—creates bonds of unity that will be the most precious souvenir that you carry back home.
Together with hundreds of other guests throughout the Girona region, you will be protagonists in a different kind of travel that can revolutionize how we explain and promote a region. You will thus live a two-fold experience, both personal and collective. What we ask of you is that you allow yourselves to be cared for and surprised by the people who welcome you—not only the family that you stay with, but also by neighbors and groups who have prepared a series of activities so that you can observe and participate in their daily lives.
It will be a journey of experiences and emotions, composed of lived moments that would be very difficult to enjoy outside of this context.
We are certain that you will enjoy this stay and that it will be the beginning of a new way of understanding the world. Organized by the people and for the people, we will forge a new, more human way to get to know one another and build cooperation between people.
We request that you kindly let us know as soon as possible if we can count on the pleasure of your presence from April 22 (or 23) – 26, 2020 for Catalonia OpenDoors. Please be aware that there are a limited number of openings, so we recommend that you reply as soon as possible.
Could you please be so kind as to follow the link below and fill in our questionnaire so that your details are automatically entered in our database.
