DOHA: Sheikh Dr Khalid bin Thani bin Abdullah Al Thani, Vice-Chairman and Managing Director of Dar Al Sharq Group, joined Felipe VI, the King of Spain, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Spain’s reputed newspaper El Pais, a subsidiary of Spanish PRISA Group. The Peninsula
The ceremony, held at Cibeles Palace in the Spanish capital Madrid, was attended by around 400 guests, including many political, business, finance and cultural leaders. Prominent figures included Acting Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, Madrid Mayor Manuela Carmena, Congressional Speaker Patxi López and several ministers .
King Felipe VI welcomed the attendees and met Sheikh Dr Khalid, who is also a member of Board of Directors of the PRISA Group.
In his keynote address, the King underscored that the newspaper has been “a witness and a recorder of all the great events and transformations experienced by our society in the last few decades.”
Invoking the names of El Pais founders José Ortega Spottorno, Jesús Polanco and Juan Luis Cebrián, the king thanked the newspaper for its “professional, intellectual and social commitment” and noted the “role of protagonist” it played in the transformation of Spanish society from a dictatorship into a democracy “integrated into Europe and with a voice of its own in the world.”
“Forty years is quite an achievement. Indeed, the appearance of the newspaper EL PAÍS on May 4, 1976, at the beginning of the transition to democracy in Spain was more than a mere news story. EL PAÍS was born from an earnest desire to defend individual freedom, to champion the building of a democracy in line with Europe, and from the conviction that Spaniards would be able to rebuild peaceful coexistence after decades of dictatorship. That’s the view of Juan Luis Cebrián, the first editor-in-chief of the newspaper and now executive chairperson of of El País and the PRISA group, in the article that opens the special 316-page magazine that is today being distributed free alongside the regular edition of the paper.”,
The newspaper, which went to press in the early morning, soon set the gold standard for journalism in Spanish and could easily hold its own on the international stage. Today EL PAÍS is a truly global newspaper, with a clear commitment to the Ibero-American world, and, through its digital edition, brings readers global coverage and is at the cutting edge of news and technology”, PRISA Group said in its anniversary message.
El Pais has agreements with newspapers in Chile (La Tercera), Mexico (El Financiero), Argentina (La Nacion), the United States (El Nuevo Herald), Dominican Republic (Caribbean), and Peru (La Repubblica), and has cooperation with several newspapers and it participates in joint network with the newspaper the Independent (UK), La Repubblica (Italy) and Le Monde (France).
