On October 6, 7 and 8, Raimat Castle, in the Segrià region, will host the Raimat Arts festival, organized by the Raimat Lleida community foundation, for the second consecutive year. It is an event that fuses music, art, gastronomy and wine, also promoting projects with a triple impact: social, economic and environmental.
The organizers of the Festival have developed a management model to minimize environmental impact and promote sustainability, promoting biodiversity and the ecosystem of the territory. The first edition was intended to provide a little help to alleviate the agricultural crisis, with projects such as training for tractor drivers. "This year we claim the rational use of water, giving the total benefits of the festival to projects of entities that aim to improve water management to alleviate the water crisis and offset the carbon footprint" explained Elena de Carandini, head of the castle and president of the foundation. From the organization, they present this initiative as a territorial transformation tool that "is positive both for Lleida and for the environment".
This first past edition was born twinned with the Napa Valley Festival, held every summer since 2006 in California, and has become a strategic partner of the event organized by the foundation. This year the Raimat Arts Festival (RAF) has presented its twinning with La Rioja Festival, a project to benefit the Association El Legado de la Música sin Fronteras and which provides sustainability to an educational-musical project in the region. In this line, there will be a wide artistic offer during the three days of the festival, among the activities, the public will be able to enjoy a repertoire of classical music performed by internationally acclaimed artists such as the guitarist Pablo Sáinz-Villegas, the soprano Raquel Lojendio, the pianist and composer Albert Guinovart and the harpist from ilerdense Berta Puigdemasa.
"Through culture and art we can promote the territory economically" Attracting people from all over the world to visit Lleida, get to know its heritage, landscape... is another of the objectives that the festival has set itself, which brings together chefs de Lleida with a KM 0 seasonal product to carry out what they have dubbed “El tast de Lleida”, a replica of the gastronomic offer of the Napa Valley festival “el tast de Napa”. In this way, some twenty producers from the province, such as Alemany or Aitona Gourmet, will have the opportunity to show off and display their product. "The fact of twinning is also a useful way of taking our culture outside the territory" with this collaboration they have been able to bring local products from the last edition of the RAF to the Napa Valley festival, at a stand in the hands of the Catalan Agency for Tourism.
With a view to the coming years and with the forecast of organizing more editions, they have a firm intention of turning the water and carbon footprint into Net Positive, reducing 50% of all established indicators and expanding social markers.
