Tag Archive for: 20th anniversary

Four Ports, One Voyage: The Escola’s 20th Anniversary Itinerary

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Sailing Ahead — 20th Anniversary

Four ports, five days, and a garden left behind in two of them: here’s what’s actually happening this October.

Between 14 and 19 October 2026, the Escola community will sail from Barcelona to Civitavecchia, Palermo and Genoa — the four ports whose 2006 partnership founded the school — for a week of ceremonies, an onboard course titled “Education beyond Intelligence”, and public celebrations at each stop, all followed live on social media under #Escola20Y.

The itinerary

The celebration opens in Barcelona on 14 October, at the Escola’s own headquarters in the port: a 20th anniversary presentation, an awards ceremony and the inauguration of the Jardins de l’Areté, followed by a press conference and the opening of the anniversary course, ahead of the ship’s departure that evening for Civitavecchia.

From there, the voyage continues to Civitavecchia on 16 October, Palermo on 17 October and Genoa on 19 October, each port hosting its own celebration together with the local Port Authority — an institutional ceremony, cultural moments, and networking between port administrations, sector companies, training centres and public institutions. Across the four stops, close to 700 people from around the Mediterranean are expected to take part.

Did you know?

Between ports, participants in the Escola’s celebratory course will take five thematic modules — on leadership, presence, listening, ethics and lifelong learning — led by Eduard Rodés, Marta Miquel, Jordi Pérez, Ramon Andreu, María José Codina Felip and Fran Arrébola Concejero, closing in Genoa with course reflections and certificate delivery.

A garden left behind in iron and stone

Alongside the voyage, the anniversary leaves something permanent at each founding port: the Jardins de l’Areté, an open space for encounter, dialogue and reflection, named for the Greek concept of areté — virtue, excellence, fulfilment. The first two gardens, in Barcelona and Civitavecchia, will be inaugurated on 14 and 16 October, each holding a sculpture made for the Escola by José Luis Pascual: laser-cut iron, shaped and hand-finished through ferroflexia, set on a wooden pedestal. A rising sun of six stars — one for each of the Escola’s founding values, and standing for the countries of its alumni — crowns a figure of Isis, goddess of wisdom, watching over a Mediterranean rendered in the metal below.

The two sculptures share a detail that isn’t visible to the eye but is built into how they were made: they face one another across 800 kilometres of open sea, Barcelona looking toward Civitavecchia and Civitavecchia looking back — a quiet nod to the bond between the two ports that hosted the Escola’s very first courses in 2004. Palermo and Genoa will mark their own version of the same legacy, each naming a site of its own where a statue in the same spirit will be unveiled during the anniversary events on 17 and 19 October.

Recognizing those who built it

Alongside the gardens, the Escola is presenting Areté institutional recognitions to the port authorities, collaborator companies, training centres and universities that have shaped its journey, and individual recognitions to the teachers, alumni and collaborators who have left their mark on its history — with ceremonies distributed across all four ports.


Journalists are invited to the institutional events at each stop, and selected media will travel with the Escola for the full voyage — part of a year-long communication campaign that will follow the anniversary under #Escola20Y. For everyone else, the best seat is on our socials: follow along as the Escola sails the route it started on, twenty years later.

A New Name at Our Doorstep: Jardins de l’Areté

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Escola Europea — News

The stretch of Port Vell right outside our offices now has an official name — and it’s one of our own values.

The stretch of Port Vell right outside our offices — between the Moll de Barcelona and the Moll de les Drassanes — now has an official name: Jardins de l’Areté.

Barcelona’s city council has approved the new designation, borrowing the same word that anchors the Escola’s 20th-anniversary values and the six stars in its anniversary logo. It’s already the Escola’s own postal address: Jardins de l’Areté, 1.

What’s in the name?

Areté (ἀρετή) is the ancient Greek idea of excellence — not a trait you’re born with, but one you build through practice, choice by choice. It’s the same idea behind the six stars in the Escola’s anniversary logo: imagination, dialogue, self-determination, effort, trust and wisdom. Six practices, not six virtues to admire from a distance.

The naming will get its official unveiling when the Escola kicks off its 20th-anniversary celebrations on October 14, 2026 alongside the installation of the anniversary sculpture on the pedestal already in place in the gardens, with a ground plaque reading “Sapientia” marking the spot.

From this October, one of the Escola’s own values has a permanent address in the heart of the Port of Barcelona — a few steps from where it all began twenty years ago.

Escola Europea Offices in Barcelona - 2026

Sailing Ahead: Twenty Years In, Still Setting Course

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Sailing Ahead — 20th Anniversary

Twenty years ago, the Escola began as a way to convince road hauliers to trust a ship — and the only argument that ever worked was putting them on deck. This October, that same instinct takes us back to sea, retracing the ports that founded us.

By Eduard Rodés, Director, Escola Europea – Intermodal Transport

Written by: Eduard Rodés, Director of the Escola Europea

Twenty years ago the Escola began as a conversation between people who trusted one another: the Ports of Barcelona, Rome (Civitavecchia) and Genoa, together with Grimaldi Lines and Grandi Navi Veloci. It is worth being honest about what we were trying to do. The first courses were not conceived as education at all; they were a way of promoting a service. We were convinced that short sea shipping worked, and the people we most needed to convince were road hauliers — operators whose entire working life was built around not using a ship.

You cannot argue somebody out of that with a presentation. What you can do is take them to the quay, put them on board and let them watch the operation happen around them.

That turned out to be a better idea than the one we had. Almost immediately, what we had designed for professionals already in the sector was reinterpreted for everyone arriving in it, and for those who simply wanted to bring their knowledge up to date. The commercial argument had become a method. In those first years we spent a great deal of time explaining why a classroom should sometimes be a ship. We no longer have to explain it. More than 25,000 participants have done that for us.

This October we mark the anniversary the way we began it: on the water. We will board ships in Barcelona and sail, in person, to Civitavecchia, Palermo and Genoa — the very ports that founded us. So when we say we are Sailing Ahead, it is not a metaphor. It is the itinerary.

Eduard Rodés speaking on board a ferry during an early Escola course

Did you know?

Palermo joined the founding group shortly after the Escola was established in 2006, completing the circle of ports that we will sail back to this October.

What people actually remember

If you ask anyone who has taken one of our courses what they remember, they seldom begin with the content. They begin with a person. Some of our trainers come from universities and some spend the rest of the week in a terminal, a shipping line or a customs office, and I have never been able to predict which of them a group will remember. We mix our groups as far as we are able — nationalities, companies, sometimes direct competitors — and people who arrive as strangers leave having shared a classroom, a quayside and a dinner table. We put a great deal of care into designing modules. What participants carry home is one another.

That is why we have always been willing to put people somewhere they did not expect: a theatre exercise, a piece of music, a simulation running inside a platform that exists nowhere else. The formats are not the point. They are what it takes to get a room full of professionals to stop performing their job titles for long enough to meet each other. It is the same discovery we made in the first year, applied to new material.

What the pandemic forced us to learn

None of it was really tested until it had to be. In our second decade the pandemic removed almost everything our model depended on: immersion, direct contact with ports and vessels, the experiential learning that had defined us from the beginning. For a while we had to hold on to our structure without being able to practise our essence. It forced a reinvention we had not planned, and with the European Union’s support through the YEP MED project it is where much of what we now call phygital actually began — not as a trend we adopted, but as a constraint we had to build our way through.

Port Virtual Lab lets trainees run simulated companies inside a digital environment built to mirror real port operations. PLIKA connects a knowledge network across the Mediterranean. This year we introduced AI training for port-logistics communities, because ignoring the tool was not an option and neither was letting it replace what matters: judgement, presence and human connection. That is the thinking behind Education Beyond Intelligence, our anniversary training programme — modules on theatre, on music, on ethics, built on the conviction that technology should sharpen a person’s discernment rather than stand in for it.

Education, like music

I have come to think of education the way I think of music: both ephemeral and lasting. Every course ends. Every group goes home. And yet something stays — a way of understanding intermodality, a sensitivity to sustainability, the habit of asking not only whether something works but whether it should.

The six stars in our anniversary logo — imagination, dialogue, self-determination, effort, trust, wisdom — were chosen to describe the people who built this place. They borrow from Areté, and we have never been much interested in defining virtue in the abstract. It is easier to point at it. As of this autumn, our address in Barcelona is Jardins de l’Areté, 1. Twenty years of work, and the word ends up on the post. There are worse ways to be reminded of what you said you stood for.

The screen can simulate, and the platform can connect a community across four countries before breakfast.

The theatre, the music, the ship and the people in the room are a different matter.

Next month we sail to the ports that made us, and I suspect the conversations on board will be the same ones we have been having since 2006: what should we teach, and how. We began by asking road hauliers to trust a ship, and the only argument that ever worked was letting them stand on the deck. Twenty years later the answer is still not technological. The next twenty will belong to whoever keeps asking, course by course, which parts of learning have to stay in the room.