Hay Festival celebrates two decades in Cartagena with Salman Rushdie, Jorge Ramos and Anne Applebaum
The initial idea of staging the Hay Festival in Cartagena, based on a cultural festival that had been born in Wales decades before, came from the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, although the blessing was given by the Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez. It was 2005 and former president Juan Manuel Santos remembers the exact moment, when he was having breakfast with both writers and a Spanish woman — Cristina Fuentes La Roche, today the international coordinator of the Hay Festival — approached them. “The two looked at each other and at the same time gave her their blessing,” recalls Santos, when she proposed creating the Hay Festival Cartagena, the first in Latin America. Gabo promised to attend the inaugural edition, so the event already had the guarantee of attracting at least all of his admirers. The Cartagena festival, which every year brings together politicians, writers, filmmakers, comedians, and other cultural leaders from around the world, celebrates its 20th edition this year with a documentary about its history, a book containing photographs of its famous guests, and the same conversations as always.
