Government aims to increase administrations' spending on culture to €200

Culture Department to receive 1.3% of the budget, but Natàlia Garriga reiterates her commitment to reaching 2%

Sílvia Marimon

2 min

The box office of the Poliorama Theatre in an archive image. Pere Virgili

Barcelona"Reactivate, recover, transform and help give as many opportunities as possible to the cultural sector". These are Catalan Culture Minister Natàlia Garriga's goals. Appearing before the Culture Committee, she explained her department's budget, which had already been made public last November 9: the Generalitat plans to increase its spending on culture by 28.3% (€82.5m) compared to 2020, the last time a budget was approved. The budget for the department stands at €389.4m, which represents 1.3% of the Generalitat's overall budget.

The percentage is still far from the the 2% target for culture demanded by the sector, but it is an improvement compared to 2020, when the weight of the budgeted cultural investment was 1.1%. "It is an important leap that allows us to move towards the 2% that we committed to achieve by the end of this parliament," she said. The other challenge is for administrative expenditure on spending to reach €200 per inhabitant, including contributions by state and local administrations. In the 2020 budget, the average was €163. "Local councils are a key element in the financing of culture," said Garriga. "In 2021, local councils accounted for 7.1% of spending on culture".

"The most important effort has been made in two general directions: popular culture and associations, which will grow by 41% and needs to be prioritised as it has traditionally been awarded less funds, and innovation and digital culture, which is new and, therefore, has a net growth of €5.6m," said Garriga. The Department has also increased its contributions to institutions and facilities: the contribution to the Institut Ramon Llull Consortium has grown, with a 30% increase for the internationalisation of culture (the Generalitat's contribution has increased from €7.3m to €9.6m), and to the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes, "traditionally underfunded", according to Garriga, which has now a contribution of €3.4m, whereas previously it was €1.3m. The endowment to the Institut Català de les Empreses Culturals also grows, and goes from €52.9m to €77.3m, because it is the section which has to support the industry.

The budget of the Directorate General for Heritage is also increased by 25% and €22m will be allocated to the creation, production and exhibition of visual and performing arts. One of the Department's projects is the creation of the Audiovisual Hub, for which some programmes will be set up immediately: "We have to promote audiovisual media right now". Thus, €25m will be allocated to helping the audiovisual sector. Another department that receives an important economic injection is Linguistic Policy, which goes from €31.2m to €38.8m.