Princess Leonor continues to take firm steps in her role as honorary president of the Princess of Asturias Foundation.
This year, at the 2024 edition of the awards that bear her title, Leonor took center stage by taking on a historic task: praising the award winners, an honor that until now had been the responsibility of King Felipe VI.
Her speech, warm and full of personal references, highlighted her connection to the values of the foundation and to her motherland, Asturias, making evident her commitment to the role she will one day assume in full.
King Felipe, proudly, mentioned in his speech the importance of this moment, reminding the audience of his first encounter with the awards when he was just 13 years old.
“I have had the honor of commending the awardees at this ceremony for more than four decades,” he expressed. But this year, he shared that he felt a mixture of excitement and pride as a king and as a father to see his daughter take on this responsibility.
Passing the floor to Leonor, Felipe VI made it clear that his role in the awards now begins to grow in a more visible way.
Princess Leonor, moved, shared that although she has been attending the ceremony since 2019, in this last decade she has felt deeply connected to the values that the foundation drives.
She expressed her gratitude towards the people who work in the organization of the awards and added that coming every year to Oviedo is an experience that fills her with joy.
Leonor revealed that she felt welcomed and loved, reflecting the special affection she feels for Asturias and the pride of representing a region that means so much to her.
Leonor’s full speech at the Princess of Asturias Awards 2024
Your Majesties, Your Highness, President of the Principality, President of the Foundation, authorities, award winners, ladies and gentlemen. I especially greet our awardees of this year and the awardees of previous editions who are with us today at this award ceremony, which is special: it has been ten years since I became honorary president of the Princess of Asturias Foundation, following the proclamation of my father as King of Spain. And although my sister and I have been participating in this ceremony since 2019, in this decade I have felt very close to the values that drive this foundation. My affection and gratitude to the trustees and all the people on the team and juries who work so hard so that today we can meet in Oviedo and celebrate the best version of life.
Being in Asturias, coming to Oviedo every year and living together with all of you the enthusiasm that is breathed these days, make us feel welcomed and loved in this land to which I am linked, as you know, not only a title and all that it entails, but it is the land of my maternal family. It is a land where I am very happy.
Pels voltants de setembre, abans que arribi el fred, comprren el seu bitllet per al tren de l’esperança.
This verse was written by Joan Manuel Serrat 60 years ago. It is in the song Els veremadors, the grape harvesters, written in Catalan and a tribute to those who were forced to leave home to go to harvest grapes far from home. In Spanish it goes like this:
Around September, before the cold weather arrives, they buy their ticket for the train of hope.
I quote it now because I like to think that the extraordinary people who today sit on this stage of the Campoamor theater offer with your work that today we reward the opposite emotion to skepticism or discouragement: THE EMOTION OF HOPE. It is the feeling that shows us that things can get better, that there is always a crack through which light can enter. This is the hope that our award winners transmit to us, men and women who combine effort, dedication and excellence in their lives.
I have read Ana Blandiana when she tells what happened in the prisons of the communist dictatorship in her country, Romania. Prisoners transmitted verses from cell to cell using the Morse alphabet as a form of resistance to hatred and madness. For me, for my generation, that fact gives poetry a role that is hard to imagine now, but we can understand that cry of hope. When Ana was my age she was not allowed to enter university. And she has not stopped standing up to totalitarianisms with her clean, clear, refined poetry. And with her activism in the defense of human rights and democracy.
This is also what the French-Iranian filmmaker, cartoonist and painter Marjane Satrapi has dedicated her life to. In her best-known work, Persepolis, she recounts a repressive childhood and adolescence in her native Iran. In her creations, Satrapi shows the conditions she experienced in those years with her imposing talent for capturing the search for a more just and inclusive world, and that gives us hope. And she has dazzlingly reinvented the language common to art and communication.
That connection, that way of feeling that unites us and gives us an awareness of humanity, is what the Magnum agency projects with its work of almost eight decades. In times of noise, haste and artifice, Magnum sharpens its gaze with its bold and truthful photojournalism, giving independence to its photographers and lending history the imprint of the facts. Faced with the tumult of images, this pioneering photographic agency captures the key moment and provides us with evidence for understanding the world, which should give us hope that we can come closer to harmony. Because it is often not easy to understand what is happening.
That is why the Organization of Ibero-American States strives to provide the most vulnerable with the tools they need to better understand and approach life, to develop as fully-fledged human beings. In other words, to achieve social development through education, science and culture. The OEI makes real what we hear so often: that only education can transform societies, consolidate democracy and promote respect for human rights. I don’t know if there is anything more hopeful than that… Cooperation and multilateralism are the hallmarks of an organization that seeks the cohesion of the Ibero-American community of nations.
With Svetlana Mojsov, Daniel Drucker, Jeffrey Friedman, Joel Habener and Jens Holst, winners of scientific and technical research awards, they have found a way to cooperate in the field of endocrinology and have developed a tool that can help people with diabetes and obesity. In a world with almost 900 million people suffering from obesity and 540 million from diabetes, it is also worth thinking about prevention as an indispensable public health strategy: this is a great hope.
Carolina Marin has won everything and in everything she has been exemplary. The most important thing is not that her years of effort, training and great performance have taken her to the top in a sport, badminton, which was little known in Spain. The most important thing is that the value is not only in the medals -even gold-, but it is the attitude in the face of adversity and triumph that defines a great athlete. She says that “I can because I think I can”. And I assure you that, for those of us who are about to leave adolescence, these are very valuable words.
If we are here, it is because what our award winners project is the courage needed to overcome discouragement and hopelessness, a task in which Michael Ignatieff is also deeply engaged. It is not easy, considering the complexity of the social and political mechanisms behind coexistence and conflict. I thought of this phrase of his: “there are those who use democracy to destroy it”. And I saw that he has spent four decades studying the rule of law, public liberties and individual rights, as well as ideologies and nationalisms. For those of us who, like me, are coming of age, approaching Ignatieff’s thought is a challenge. A challenge that attracts us because it speaks to us of shared values and the permanent challenge of coexistence.
I return at this point to Joan Manuel Serrat, because this musician and poet from Poble Sec is much more than an artistic reference for several generations whom he has made happy. He has also shown his commitment to democracy and tolerance. These days I have listened to many of his songs. And I have carefully read his lyrics. Serrat declares himself in favor of living because, from time to time, life sharpens with the brush; our skin bristles and we lack words to name what it offers to those who know how to use it.
May we all, today, here, from the Campoamor Theater, find motives and opportunities and buy that ticket for the train of hope.
And of course, you know, fight for what you want and don’t despair if something goes wrong. Today can be a great day and tomorrow, too.
Thank you!