The President of Abertis and the Abertis Foundation, Salvador Alemany, gave a speech today at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris. The presentation, attended by Irina Bokova, UNESCO’s Director-General, showcased the work of the UNESCO-Abertis Foundation Centre. This public-private partnership was established when Castellet Castle, the headquarters of the Abertis Foundation, was designated as the Centre on Mediterranean Biosphere Reserves.

The Dalí retrospective, sponsored by Abertis through its Brazilian subsidiary Arteris, is already the most visited exhibition about the artist in history. During its time in Rio de Janeiro it was visited by around one million people, beating the previous records set at Centre Pompidou in Paris (790,000) and the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid (732,000).

This June saw the third worst ever flooding in the states of Paraná and Santa Catarina, Brazil, where the Abertis Group operates 3 toll roads through its subsidiary Arteris (Planalto Sul, Litoral Sul and Régis Bittencourt). Straight away, the Abertis Foundation started channelling the donations made by its employees from all over the world to show their support for their Brazilian colleagues.

The 3rd Abertis International Prize for Transport Infrastructure Management was awarded in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Dr. Aida Calviño Martínez, in the category of doctoral thesis, for her work entitled “Algunas herramientas estadísticas y matemáticas para la modelización del tráfico“. In the category of dissertations and final or master’s theses, the winner was Pierre-Antoine Laharotte, for his work, “Analyse de l’apport des donnees Bluetooth pour la caracterisation du traffic. Traitement du reseau semi urbain of Brisbane“. They were both winners of the national prizes awarded by the Abertis Chair in Spain and France respectively.

Abertis manages Puerto Rico’s Teodoro Moscoso Bridge and, through the Metropistas consortium, the PR-22 and PR-5 toll roads. A road safety campaign will be held on these routes to inform and raise awareness about the importance of responsible driving. In the second phase of the campaign, awareness raising messages will target the youngest members of the population, who are currently pedestrians and future drivers.

The Abertis Foundation is sponsoring the largest retrospective ever on the British artist Richard Hamilton. The exhibit will be housed at Madrid’s Reina Sofía Museum from 27 June to 13 October 2014. Richard Hamilton himself, one of the most influential artists of the 20th Century, designed the show specifically for the museum, directly working with the Spanish institution from early 2010 until prior to his death in 2011.