«The importance of the Classroom is to show the people of Rioja that culture is for everyone»

«I have toured Laurel Street with almost all the guests and I have wonderful memories. Like when Eduardo Punset stopped to talk to every young person in each and every one of the bars because he said that ‘youth sticks’. Or when Francesc Miralles took out a notebook in El Soriano to interview the man with the iron because he seemed to him ‘a Zen master, concentrated on the same monotonous work with the same passion for thirty years.’

These are just a couple of anecdotes of the many lived by Andrés Pascual in sixteen years as director of the LA RIOJA Culture Classroom, the forum promoted by this newspaper through which many prominent national names in literature, science, dissemination and culture in general; all from the agenda of the Riojan writer and lecturer, who is now leaving this occupation.

He took charge of the Classroom in October 2008, a year after publishing his first novel with Plaza and Janés, ‘The Guardian of the Lotus Flower’. “Since then,” he says, “I have published with the two major publishing groups, Penguin and Planeta, where I have had the fortune of making friends with the leading figures of the literary scene, whom I have ended up inviting to La Rioja.”

He assures that “it took little to convince them”: “Everyone wants to have a good day in La Rioja, eat legumes and vegetables from the garden and drink our wine. Of course, the enormous coverage that the newspaper and the collaborating entities give them is a great asset. But if there is something that each and every one, without exception, has told me when I left them at the hotel at night, it was ‘but how nice the people of Logroño are’.

We are talking about references such as Irene Vallejo, Dolores Redondo, Javier Cercas, Juan Luis Arsuaga, Paul Preston, Irene Villa, Bernardo Atxaga, Pilar Urbano or the Riojans Pablo Sainz-Villegas and Pepe Viyuela. The word that defines this long list is “universality”: “We have tried to choose all the expressions of culture so that everyone could identify.”

Precisely, in his opinion, “the importance of the Classroom is to show the people of Rioja that culture belongs to everyone.” That is why he has two thanks: to Diario LA RIOJA and UNIR Fundación “for betting on culture” and “to all attendees, whether they have come once or a hundred.” «If I can boast of something, beyond having managed to fill many of the classrooms, it is that I have dedicated myself to this work with body and soul. “I don’t know how to do things any other way and that’s why I haven’t failed in a single one of the 143.”

Now Andrés Pascual says goodbye as coordinator of the Culture Classroom. “To have water you have to let it flow,” he says with one of his frequent philosophical quotes. But, if everything passes and everything remains, he remains in this house as a member of the family.