Estepona City Council inaugurates this Thursday the eight-storey library in Mirador del Carmen

The Consistory has organized a program of events that will include the filmmaker and former Minister of Culture, Ángeles González Sinde, the general director of the Botín Foundation, Íñigo Sáenz de Miera, the poets Antonio Lucas and Ben Clark and the musician Alejandro Pela.

The Estepona City Council will inaugurate this coming Thursday 21 the Library of Contemporary Cultures located on eight floors of the Mirador del Carmen. The opening ceremony of this iconic and innovative cultural space will feature a full program of events that include such prominent names as the filmmaker and former Minister of Culture, Ángeles González Sinde, who will participate in a cultural colloquium. There will also be space for music and poetry.

The inauguration of the new library will begin with an open day, from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., when the general public will be able to see the new facilities and this innovative cultural equipment first hand.

The main opening ceremony will take place at 8.30 p.m., with a colloquium with the participation of the filmmaker and former Minister of Culture, Ángeles González Sinde; the general director of the Botín Foundation, Íñigo Sáenz de Miera; and the writer and member of the Board of Trustees of the Antonio Gala Foundation, Ben Clark.

The program of events is completed with a recital by the journalist and poet Antonio Lucas, and a concert by Alejandro Pelayo, a Cantabrian musician known for his work as a composer, pianist and producer of the group Marlango, who has been involved in composition all his life.

The Library of Contemporary Cultures has been designed as a transversal, dynamic cultural center, oriented towards the future and people’s needs. For this reason, it has been equipped with the most advanced technology and resources, so that its eight floors offer the public a complete range of uses. Thus, it has a studio for recording podcasts, voices and radio programs, but also an area of ‘makespace’ (new media, digital printing and digital scenery), workshop area, audiovisual room, ‘gamer’ area, virtual reality, spaces for ‘coworking’ work groups, and for initiation to robotics. It also has a documentation area specializing in the sea and the environment, with a specialized catalog on this subject.

The center is designed to provide the user with a unique experience when visiting it on a day-to-day basis, so that it becomes an extension of their home, allowing them to experience the cultural and technological space.

With the opening of the Library of Contemporary Cultures, all the equipment planned for the Mirador del Carmen Tower has been completed, complementing the auditorium, the exhibition hall and the Conservatory of Music.

The first two floors of the library are independent areas dedicated to children and young people, and are not connected to each other. From the third floor up to the eighth floor, they are connected by a staircase that creates an effect of space in height. Thus, the second floor, dedicated to the children’s area, is intended for children from 1 to 12 years of age. In the area there are children’s books cataloged according to age range, educational games, children’s cabins, and space for parents to be comfortable and work on the computer if they need to.

The second floor has been designed as the Future Zone, a multipurpose space for users between the ages of 13 and 18. It is a meeting room for teenagers to do group or individual work, study, read or watch audiovisual content. It is made up of seats connected to each other in the form of bleachers. On this floor there is a ‘gamer’ area, video games, virtual reality and a catalog of books of juvenile literature and comics. There will also be tablets for digital consultation.

The third floor is dedicated to consultation and newspaper library, with a reading, study and rest area. This room has a bookshelf/center of interest called New Expressions, which is focused on new contemporary narratives (literature, art, music and film).

The room dedicated to study and research is located on the 4th floor, specialized in sea and environment, with access to the digital and physical catalog specialized in this subject. On the fifth floor is the coworking area, a space that can be reserved by work groups, whether students, researchers or workers.

Floors 6 and 7 are study and workshop areas. They also have a tiered area where workshops, conferences and courses can be offered, which will be very sensitive to the different groups in the city, so that they can be used for social development.

The top floor of the library becomes a special space where audiovisual, cinema, music and radio will coexist, with a booth for podcast, voice and radio recordings. There will be seats with their built-in tablet so that the user can listen to music in a program that Spotify will design for the Mirador del Carmen, taking into account the programming of the exhibition hall and the conservatory.

The first major event that will host the library facilities will be the Literary Festival of Estepona (FLEST), which will take place this coming weekend of November 23 and 24, and will bring together a score of big names in literature, music, gastronomy and artistic creation.