I international water colour painting competition "Village of Rascafría"

The Town Council of the Village of Rascafria hereby announces the Water Colour Painting Contest which carries its name in order to make public its recent history of six centuries as well as the privileged geographical surroundings of the National Park of the Guadarrama Mountain Range where the Village is set.

Water will be the unifying element, the common thread and central theme of this Competition because its marks and its traces contain the cultural and historical memory of Rascafría, the Lozoya Valley and its inhabitants. Rivers, torrents, springs, fountains, bridges, irrigation canals and mills form part of the collective memory and are meeting places with stories, mysteries and customs.

Art, through water colour painting, can be a good instrument to show and say what words cannot express, unfolding a large range of views which kindle our social and collective memory of water landscapes.

In this light, the Competition wants to build new bridges with people, groups and institutions from the broad world of Culture both nationally and internationally to collectively enjoy an aesthetic sensitiveness and an experience full of sensations and emotions which leads us to become more aware of the need to care for this vital element which water represents.

This Competition is announced with the idea of continuing indefinitely in time, in the same place where in the first decades of the twentieth century students from Spanish Art Schools enjoyed the successive Painters Scholarships from El Paular.

This continuity will help to create a cultural and social movement which will enhance the value of both El Paular Monastery’s multidisciplinary legacy of hundreds of years and the vanguard proposals of renowned artists like Luis Feito López, an adopted son in the Village. The resulting dialogue must be greater awareness and enrichment and an opening to new ways of recognition in our history.

Creating and maintaining this special space to meet and communicate should help to contribute to offering quality tourism which the Village of Rascafria is working at for a large part of its future.