The first institutional visit of Pere Aragonès to an Asian country will be next week. The president, accompanied by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Meritxell Serret, will travel to South Korea, where he intends to strengthen ties with economic, commercial and political agents, as well as to inaugurate a new foreign delegation of the Generalitat in Seoul.
The Republican will meet, among others, Kim Dong-yeon, governor of Gyeonggi, the most populated region of the country, considered an economic and industrial engine of South Korea and with which the Catalan Administration has had a collaboration agreement since 1999. Aragonès will also meet with relevant Korean companies that share interests with Catalonia in the technological field, automotive, electric batteries and water management, among others. Lotte Energy Materials stands out, a company that intends to invest some 1,200 million euros in Mont-roig del Camp, as pointed out by the spokesperson for the Catalan Executive, Patrícia Plaja, in the press conference this afternoon after the meeting of the Executive Council. . The Hyundai automotive company also appears in the travel plan.
The Government has long had the idea of consolidating the presence of the Generalitat in Asia. There is already an office in Japan, with a designated delegate, but the Catalan Executive hopes it will be fully operational next year. With the president's visit, the Korean company will start moving earlier and will be activated at full capacity under the leadership of Jaeyeok Yoon Kang.
The Generalitat has fully established delegations in Europe and America, covering almost the entire territory of both continents. The next phase of institutional deployment is Asia. Aragonès will travel to this continent for the first time as head of the Government after having visited fourteen European and American countries in fifteen trips.
The travel plan of the president of the Generalitat is not limited to Seoul. He plans to move south on November 29, to the port of Busan. It is the sixth most important port in the world, after Shanghai, Singapore, Shenzhen, Ningbo-Zhoushan and Guangzhou. The port of Barcelona has had an agreement with the port of Busan since 2020 to manage and operate a logistics center in the Logistics Activity Zone (ZAL) of the Catalan city.
In Busan he will also visit Kwater, the South Korean Government agency that manages water, where Aragonès hopes to exchange experiences in a context of significant drought in Catalonia. Likewise, he will move to the center of ECO Delta Smart City, a public project for the construction of a smart city within Busan, with 11.8 square kilometers and where some 76,000 people are expected to live together.
Serret will continue the trip from December 1 to 4. She will do so in Japan, where she plans to meet with the Kyoto Government, Japanese parliamentarians and the Japanese development cooperation agency, in addition to visiting cultural events related to Catalonia.
