Iberian EUSTORY Competition 2020: Strong Performance Involving Six Countries
The 13th award ceremony of EUSTORY Iberia took place on 23 October 2020 as part of the Real Maestranza Scholarships and Awards Ceremony. This year’s topic was "Political Transitions". More than 40 schools and 105 students from Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Romania, Portugal and Spain took part in the competition, making the jury’s decision a tough one.
For the first time in the history of the Iberian History Competition, the award ceremony was streamed, allowing students, tutors and relatives to follow it live even if they were a thousand kilometres away. Winners attended the ceremony digitally via a zoom meeting which was projected in the auditorium of the Real Maestranza de Caballería de Ronda, bringing them to centre stage.
After the introductory words of the Lieutenant of the Grand Brother and President of the Governing Board of the Real Maestranza de Caballería de Ronda, Rafael Atienza Medina, the director of the Real Maestranza, Ignacio Herrera de la Muela, announced the winners. A short video sent by each of the winners was shown, explaining their research and experience. After that, the tutor of one of the second prize winners, Luis Miguel Escribano, gave a short speech encouraging the participants to pursue another way of learning.
The first prize went to Adrià Polo, a student from Castellón for his analysis of the transition of Vinaroz (Castellón).
Four second prizes were awarded to a Spanish, a Chilean and two Portuguese entries. The first of them was carried out by a group from the school Amor de Dios in Madridejos. The project combines an historical essay with fiction starring four characters. Octavia Olsen's work, a student at the British School in Santiago de Chile, is an exhaustive research that integrates both national and local perspectives. The Portuguese prize winners, Maria Vitória Gonçalves and Lucas Quaresma, from Lisbon, studied the delicate phenomenon of more than half a million returned emigrants from former African colonies to Portugal during their transition, based on numerous interviews. Finally, the student Gustavo de Paula e Sousa from Lisbon produced a newspaper that documents the first years of the political transition in the country.
Five third prizes were given to a Portuguese, a Chilean and three Spanish groups. The first of them stands out because of a strong presence of music since its authors, Diogo de Miranda, Manuel Monteiro and Matilde Cruz, study music at the Conservatório de Música de Barcelos. A group of 10 Chilean students prepared a documentary about the transition to democracy in 1990 and how this process is linked to the social outbreak of October 2019. Similarly, three students from Valencia presented a written piece of work and a documentary where they interview five of the six mayors of their locality and analyse the transition from a wide perspective. Paula López Sánchez studied the transition in Dolores de Pacheco (Murcia) through social memory and unwritten history. Finally, Luis Hernández Ramos from Valladolid carried out an analysis of the democratisation process at schools up to the present day.
There were six distinctions awarded. The first one was given to two pieces of research of the Mexican and Romanian transitions. The second went to two works that deepen the cultural understanding of this historical process. And the final two awarded projects take local perspectives of the towns of Cartagena and Ronda respectively.
The competition is organised by the Real Maestranza de Caballería of Ronda and the Associação de Professores de Historia de Portugal (APH). The association of teachers of History and Geography of Andalusia "Hésperides" also collaborated in it. Watch the complete video (with English subtitles) with the prize winners of 2020 explaining their research and experience here.