San Miguel de Allende Arts Festival (FASMA) Announced Second Edition

The cultural meeting will be held from August 4 to 20 in public gardens, churches, theaters and historic buildings.

Published June 15, 2023

Positioning San Miguel de Allende as the main cultural destination in Mexico is the objective of the San Miguel de Allende Arts Festival (FASMA), which in its second edition will have Austria as a guest country.

The cultural meeting will be held from August 4 to 20 in public gardens, churches, theaters and historic buildings that will serve, for 17 uninterrupted days, as stages for the presentations of the best national and foreign artists dedicated to the different manifestations of the fine arts.

The functions of dance, opera, classical music, literary conferences, jazz and visual arts exhibitions, are aimed at the national and foreign inhabitants of the city, especially young children and low-income families, announced Eduardo Adame Godard, director of FASMA and president of the Casa de Europa Foundation in Mexico.

“It is a party in which 32 cultural organizations of great trajectory in San Miguel de Allende participate, some of them with almost one hundred years of existence. During the three weekends it is estimated that we will have around 110 activities in various forums, “said Adame Godard, at a press conference.

The artistic offer will also benefit domestic tourists traveling during the summer school holidays, without leaving behind visitors with extended stays mainly from the United States and Canada, as well as tourists from Europe and the rest of the world.

“We will try to give an Austrian touch to the festival, by having Austria as guest of honor,” said Adame Godard.

Lorenz Brunner, director of the Austrian Cultural Forum in Mexico, thanked the deference as his country was the special guest of FASMA.

“I am very happy to have the honor of representing the country that is honored in this second edition of the festival. We have a very fun program with Austrian artists from all artistic disciplines, although there will also be a group of Latin American students who are doing their studies in the city of Salzburg.”

Luis Enrique Quezada, executive director of the Chamber Music Festival that joins FASMA advanced a surprise, which consists of the projection of silent films that will be musicalized live with orchestra, and with the participation of opera singers with presence from all over the world.

“We do not aspire to copy the International Cervantino Festival, which is a great reference, we can tell our own story because we have the strengths to do so, in its second edition, we do not want to compare ourselves, we would like to take it as an example,” said Quezada.

But it was the director of the festival of San Miguel de Allende who clarified that “the Cervantino is almost a dependency of the federal government and has the support of state and municipal authorities, here FASMA is a festival made by cultural organizations, with the support of the state and municipal government.”

Five institutions dedicated to the promotion of opera participate in the festival, such as the NGO Ópera de San Miguel, chaired by Charles Oppenheim.

“For Ópera de San Miguel, an institution that promotes operatic voices in Mexico, the festival is very important because it allows us to offer concerts as a way to promote this genre; for this occasion we prepared a program with arias and opera duets by two of the great Austrian composers of classicism: Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. What better way than to pay tribute to Austria with two of its great universal artists.”

Francisco Javier Valverde, director of tourism development, said that for this festival of the arts they have available 3,200 rooms in San Miguel de Allende.

“Last year we had about 6,200 local visitors, 624,9 regional visitors, 912 from the various states of the Republic and 6,<> foreigners. The goal is to double those figures, and we expect an economic spill of more than <> million pesos direct for this event.”

San Miguel de Allende Arts Festival. Beginning (fasma.com.mx)