Prince of Asturias Awards 1981–2014. Speeches

10 O viedo | C ampoamor T heatre | Thus, this Institute performs a huge task of cataloguing and analysing the plant life and wildlife of its country, as well as major research work into the contribution these organisms can make, while at the same time studying ways of fighting the environmental degradation of the planet. All of this represents a set of goals and an undertaking that deserve all our support and our humble admiration. With his life, President Mario Soares, Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation, has brought into flower again the ancient Roman virtue of the man of goodwill and the man of state. There have been few, who, like him, have been able to personify the formula of true greatness which Ricardo Reis expressed in one of his odes: Para ser grande, sé entero. Nada tuyo exageres o excluyas. Sé todo en cada cosa. Pon cuanto eres en lo mínimo que hagas. Así en cada lago la luna entera brilla, porque alta vive (In order to be great, be whole. Exclude or exaggerate nothing of yours. Be everything in each thing. Put all of yourself into the slightest thing that you do. So in every lake the full moon shines, because it lives on high) Temperance in the face of extreme or precipitate attitudes, his admirable democratic character, his work in international relations and his intellectual interests make him an example to refer to in a country which we dearly regard as our sister-land. His militant Europeanism is a fixed ideological pillar, as constant as is also his belief in a European Union, free yet mutually committed. At the same time, he is convinced that, from our own identity forged over the centuries, deep-rooted cooperation between Spain and Portugal may be projected in fruitful actions towards Latin America, where our cultures have spread and intermingled in a likeable reality. Mr President, “ Hispano soy, y nada portugués me es ajeno ,” (Hispanic I am, and nothing Portuguese is foreign to me) wrote a Spanish poet in words I wish to assume as my own. The whole history of Portugal is clearly full of Spanish resonances, just as that of Spain is an echo, ever repeating the name of Portugal. This very city of Oviedo, in which the age-old stones of its monuments evoke in Spaniards the memory of their historic past, is an unavoidable point of reference when it comes to understanding the shared beginnings of our respective nationalities. From here, from this Asturias to which Camões sang in “ Os Lusiada ”, was to come King Alfonso I to undertake, together with the peoples of Spain and Portugal, in the lands of Spain and Portugal, the great enterprise of the Reconquest. And it is precisely from this university city of Oviedo that one of the sharpest minds of his century, the ironic and tender Clarín, ahead of his time, called in one of his journalistic writings for “a common understanding of the spirit of Spain and Portugal, bymeans of intellectual communion”, which he considered more fruitful, more urgent and more solid than any other. Let us vow to make the ideas of these great intellectuals and the efforts and convictions of Your Excellency to reach a closer relation between our two countries a happy reality. Your Majesty, There are some verses of the Holy Koran which say that those who do good will be rewarded in posterity with undying remembrance. The Sermon on the Mount in our Holy Book declares, 27 th O ctober 1995