Address on the opening Alexander von Humboldt Season in Quito, Ecuador, on 13 February 2019
Autor Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier
Erschienen in HiN XX, 38 (2019)
DOI 10.18443/283 URL http://dx.doi.org/10.18443/283
Introduction by Ottmar Ette
From 11 to 16 February 2019, the President of the Federal Republic of Germany, together with his wife and a delegation accompanying him, travelled to Latin America. The destinations of this trip were the two South American countries Colombia and Ecuador. The journey took the Federal President to Cartagena de Indias, the Caribbean archipelago of the Islas del Rosario and finally to Bogotá. From the capital of Colombia, the group travelled to the capital of Ecuador, to the Pacific Archipelago of the Galapagos Islands, to the famous volcanic giant Antisana and finally to Guayaquil and from there back to Germany.
The journey followed in the footsteps of Alexander von Humboldt and, on the Galapagos Islands, Charles Darwin. The homage to the Prussian scholar Humboldt was an important part of the delegation’s visit. The actual highlight of the Federal President’s stay in Latin America was his speech in Quito on 13 February 2019, with which he ceremoniously opened the “Humboldt Season” on the occasion of Alexander von Humboldt’s 250th birthday. This fact is of considerable symbolic importance, as the opening did not take place in Berlin, but in a Latin American capital to which the younger of the two Humboldt brothers was particularly committed. We would like to thank the Federal President and the Office of the Federal President for their kind permission to reprint the text in its English and German versions below.
