2016 Eurocon Barcelona Guests of Honour : Aliette de Bodard (France); Richard Morgan (UK); Andrzej Sapkowski (Poland); Johanna Sinisalo (Finland) ; Rosa Montero (Spain) ;
Johanna Sinisalo ; Rosa Montero
GoH artist Enrique Corominas.
GoH Jun Miyazaki, Fan Guest of Honour from Hungary.
Welcome to the 3rd Progress Report!
Barcelona will host the 2016 Eurocon which will be held November 4th-6th, 2016 together with BCon (for Barcelona Con), the 2016 Spanish National Convention Hispacon at the Centre for Contemporary Culture (CCCB, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Montalegre 5).
Limit on Memberships
If you are reading this because you are interested in attending but have not yet bought a membership: we will probably limit the memberships to a maximum of 800. To make sure of a membership, join now! (Also, please note that people will only be included in programme items if they are members of BCon. If you are interested in becoming a speaker or panellist, join now! It will very helpful as regards programme design if you join BCon sooner rather than later.)
Hotel News!
As per Progress Report #2, our convention hotel is:
HOTEL CATALONIA RAMBLAS
(4 star), C/Pelai, 28.
We hope that Eurocon members will reserve rooms at the convention hotel itself, or at one of its two partners nearby, because enough reservations mean that the Eurocon will have free rooms for events in the convention hotel. The hotel group assure us that there will be no cheaper offers of their rooms on the internet.
We also hope that members will reserve rooms early, such as now, to encourage the Catalonia hotel group. It costs you nothing to reserve rooms now. You don’t pay for rooms until the convention. (See below.) Room reservations are by email. It’s very important that you that put EUROCON is the subject line of an email. Reserving by email is much more convenient than fighting with an on-line form if you want to modify your booking, and also makes specific requests easier. The hotels are fully disability compliant.
Here you can find the contact details necessary for making your reservations. Please note that Hotel Catalonia Ramblas is the official hotel to the convention and several of the events in the programme will be held there. However, the other two suggested hotels are nearby, at easy (and beautiful!) walking distance from the Catalonia Ramblas. All three hotels have free WiFi. We have personally tested the buffet breakfast at the convention hotel and found it excellent (oh, the sacrifices we endure to bring you the best!).
Please read the instructions in the pdf document (click here to download) (or here). You DO NOT need to print or send the document itself to the hotel, simply include in your email the details requested, i.e. name, passport number or D.N.I, credit card details.
It is VERY IMPORTANT to state EUROCON in the subject line of your e-mail communications with the hotel, so that they apply the agreed rates.
Hotel Catalonia Ramblas 4*
(Official hotel for the Convention; 120 rooms)
Contact person: Mónica Revuelto
E.mail : ramblas.reservas2@hoteles-catalonia.es
Street address: Carrer de Pelai, 28, 08001 Barcelona, España
Teléfono:+34 933 16 84 00
€ 110 Double room for single use
(breakfast buffet; 10% vat included)
€ 121 Double room for two people
(breakfast buffet; 10% vat included)
(40 rooms)
Contact person: Ángel Espinel
E.mail : catedral@hoteles-catalonia.es
Street address: Carrer Arcs, 10, 08002 Barcelona, España
Teléfono:+34 933 43 67 75
€ 132 Double room for single use
(breakfast buffet; 10% vat included)
€ 143 Double room for two people
(breakfast buffet; 10% vat included)
(80 rooms)
Contact person: Araceli Suñé.
E.mail : catalunya@hoteles-catalonia.es
Street address: Carrer Bergara, 11, 08002 Barcelona, España
Teléfono:+34 933 01 51 51
€ 100 Double room for single use
(breakfast buffet; 10% vat included)
€ 110 Double room for two people
(breakfast buffet; 10% vat included)
In the event of cancellations we have agreed as follows, to reflect concessions the hotel group is giving us:
From 1st April 2016 to 31st May 2016, the hotel will charge 50% of the first night.
Cancellations between 1/06/16 until 30/06/16: 75% of the first night
Cancellations between 1/07/16 until 31/08/16: will have a charge first night
Cancellations between 1/09/16 until 30/09/16: 50% of the total reservation.
Cancellations between 1/10/16 until 27/10/16: 2 nights of the total reservation.
From 28th October 2016 until the arrival date will be regarded as No Shows: 100% of the total reservation.
No Shows: the total reservation will be charged.
So you can book your room now and cancel completely free up to the end of March next year.
Day Memberships
If we don’t reach the 800 members limit, people can pay at the door 15 Euros for a day membership, which will entitle them to a badge and a programme for the Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, but not to any welcome bag of delights.
New Faces
Since Progress Report # 2 we have added another Guest of Honour, Spain’s Rosa Montero, bringing our tally of guests to 7 persons—as well as 4 new committee members, Susana Vallejo and Sergi Viciana, Ana (‘Ani’) Tarroja-Marco and David Alcoy. Read all about these on the ‘Guests of Honour’ and ‘Who Are We?’ pages.
Programme (new developments)
“Evil Females” alias “Twisted Women SF Writers of Europe”: volunteers?
Translators Panel: Any interest in this?—but with a difference, which we don’t know yet
Lem: We continue to await any message from Poland’s Pro Fantasica Foundation about their proposed participation.
Because of our agreement with the Catalonia hotel group, we should now have ample free function space in the designated convention hotel, so we will probably hold the majority of programme items in the hotel itself (along with the art show and dealers room etc) for centralisation, using the almost adjacent CCCB for opening and closing ceremonies, big items such as GoH interviews, and some other items. Official hotel is 50 meters away from CCCB.
Art Show
Some artists have already approached us—we welcome more approaches! (It’s too soon yet to calculate the available space.)
Featured Places to visit
#8 Gigamesh bookshop
Probably the largest SFF (and games and comics and figures and Go) bookshop in Europe with nearly 2 kilometres of elegant and ingenious shelving including maybe 200 metres in English. (Stockholm’s mighty SF-Bokhandeln has not yet declared its vital statistics.) For a lot more info, see http://www.ianwatson.info/alex-crow-has-the-biggest-sf-bookshop-in-europe/.
The motto of Gigamesh is ‘vicio y subcultura’—’vicio’ in the sense of addictions. We are addicted to SF, are we not? Gigamesh is about 15 minutes walk from Plaça de Catalunya by way of Carrer Fontanella (do use a street plan), but you can also cut through the top of the picturesque old city from near the top of the Ramblas in order to pass by the sublime Palace of Catalan Music (featured in PR 1).The staff of Gigamesh are planning welcome surprises for early arrivals and during the convention.
#9: Friki Shops, and The Arc de Triomf
After your pilgrimage to the Gigamesh bookshop, continue a few hundred metres further away from the centre of town along Carrer d’Ali Bey past various other interesting SFF, games, comics, manga, anime, miniatures, and alternative culture shops—such as Freaks (great non-SF books—spend your heart out!), with several others in neighbouring streets, and at the end the alternative costumier (including Steampunk and Gothic) Madame Chocolat. Then you arrive at the imposing triumphal arch built in colourful Moorish-inspired brickwork by a Modernist architect as the gateway to the fair held in the large and pleasant Parc de la Ciutadella as part of the Universal Exhibition of 1888.
Walk down through the park, seeing pigeons sharing their home with wild parakeets, and you arrive soon enough at the rather excellent zoo.
#10: Barcelona Zoo
Founded in 1892 in buildings used for the Universal Exhibition, the zoo was greatly improved in 1940 by becoming the first open-plan zoo in the world where animals were uncaged, kept in their place simply by walled ditches—paradoxically at the same time as Spain was becoming Franco’s prison camp for much of its human population and when the Catalan language was banned for use on the phone. As well as creatures great and small, there are Modernist delights in the zoo such as the fountain topped by The Lady with the Umbrella, a symbol of Barcelona:
In 2014 a former police chief, turned far right activist, and self-styled ‘survivalist’, jumped into the lion enclosure. Strangely, he survived; the lions only toyed with him for half an hour, all be it roughly, while firemen sprayed the scene.
Featured Place to eat well
#3: There’s a Brewery with food only 5 Minutes Away!
Not many minutes from our convention is the Moritz Brewery, now also a gastro eatery, with big historic stonecellars. Their fun website in English with menus is worth navigating around. On their map of the immediate vicinity you’ll see the edge of the CCCB (Centr… de Contemp…).Try their Epidor on draught/de barríl; you might like it.
Progress Report #4 will be published in March 2016, and Progress Report #5 one month before the convention.
Media Partner
Science Fiction & Science Fact Concatenation is a great source of European SF news, online at http://www.concatenation.org/.
There’s a review by Sue Burke of the 2014 Hispacon.
We hope to see you in Barcelona !
The reputed English SF Writer Ian Watson.