Opening of the Spanish Hospitality Campus
With all the necessary facilities - hotel rooms, restaurant, kitchen, research, spa, ... So that professionals of excellent standard graduate from it.
The chosen city has been El Puerto de Santa María, in Cádiz. Hostelería de España thus launches this training platform in hospitality, tourism and innovation, which also provides its services to the Spanish Confederation of Hotels and Tourist Accommodation (CEHAT). This creation is the result of the agreement between the Hostelería España business confederation and the provincial institution. Located in the ‘El Madrugador’ Professional Excellence Campus of the Provincial Council of Cádiz.
At the opening event, the provincial councillor for the Employment area and vice-president of the Institute for Employment and Socioeconomic, Technological Development (IEDT), Ana Carrera, was in charge of representing the Provincial Council at the presentation of the initiative. In her acknowledgement, she stated, “It is a source of satisfaction that the Spanish Hospitality Campus is being set up in Cádiz and that our province thus becomes a national benchmark for quality training and innovation in the tourism and hospitality sector”, two of the strategic sectors for the socioeconomic growth of the province and of the country as a whole.
According to Ana Carrera, “the Provincial Council is clear that Cádiz has the raw materials needed to stand out in such competitive sectors, but we are also convinced that excellence must be the differentiating nuance between good and best. To achieve that goal, we set up the Professional Excellence Campus some time ago, and today we are presenting the Spanish Hospitality Campus, with the aim of offering specialised, up-to-date and useful education that promotes the professionalisation of those working in the fields of gastronomy, hospitality and tourism, and thus facilitates job creation”.
The Spanish Hospitality Campus aims to deliver training grounded in R&D&I in the tourism and hospitality sector. At its physical headquarters in Cádiz, it will have 9,700 square metres of ‘El Madrugador’ at the service of training, distributed across four interconnected buildings. The facilities include replicas of different settings: hotel rooms and apartments, reception areas, kitchens, bars and restaurants, swimming pools and spas, conference and convention halls, travel agencies and tourist information offices, among others.
At the opening, the services to be offered by the Spanish Hospitality Campus were presented. It will feature classrooms for both in-person and online training, tasting rooms, kitchens and pastry workshops. It will also have an agri-food laboratory, an organic vegetable garden and a data processing centre, as well as an auditorium with capacity for 250 people in an annex building.
The president of Hostelería de España, José Luis Yzuel, wished to highlight at the opening that “our country’s hospitality sector is a global benchmark, and despite the difficult socioeconomic context we are living through, marked by uncertainty, we must keep working to maintain that excellence. The professionalisation of the sector is the pillar of business growth, and this is only possible through quality training adapted to the needs of companies and workers. This is what the Hospitality Campus seeks to achieve, taking a major step forward with the opening of this centre”.
For his part, Ramón Estalella, general secretary of CEHAT, stressed that from the hotel employers’ association “we applaud the development of this campus, since we are the sector that employs the most people in our country, providing direct and indirect employment to 500,000 people. One of our basic objectives is the dignification and recognition of restaurant and accommodation professionals in Spain, the cornerstone of our tourist success. The social sustainability of the sector depends on the development of professional careers and on our ability to ensure that our visitors see their expectations exceeded”.
The Campus is located in a strategic enclave for Spanish tourism and is interconnected with all other territories through the most advanced technology platforms and the network of associations of Hostelería de España and CEHAT. This professional campus is located at Carretera El Portal A-2002, Km 1.5, 11500 El Puerto de Santa María, Cádiz.
