Excelencias Group, Doña Maria de las Mercedes Foundation Ink Collaboration Agreement

Excelencias Group, Doña Maria de las Mercedes Foundation Ink Collaboration Agreement

Jose Carlos de Santiago, president and CEO of the Excelencias Group, and Nicolas Muela, director of the Doña Maria de las Mercedes Foundation, signed an agreement whereby both institutions commit themselves to collaborating in a number of activities within the framework of Iberian-American nations.

The Foundation was created on Dec. 27, 2006 in Seville, in the headquarters of the Andalusia Confederation of Entrepreneurs and is named after Doña Maria de las Mercedes de Borbon, mother of His Majesty King Don Juan Carlos. The president is Her Royal Highness Doña Elena de Borbon y Grecia, and it features Don Santiago Herrero as chairman. This is a permanent and non-lucrative joint entity with a cultural, social and corporate orientation that seeks to strengthen Andalusia’s relationships with the community of Iberian-American nations through social, cultural, economic and cooperative matters.

The foundation promotes and fosters those forms of expression linked to its goals and in that sense it organizes and plans activities aimed at building on closer historic and traditional ties between Andalusia and Hispanic America.

The Excelencias Group was founded in 1997 by Spain-based Exclusivas Latinoamericanas, a company that pursues the promotion of tourist, cultural and gastronomic information from the Americas and the Caribbean. It relies on 35 means of communication, both printed and online, published in five languages. The group has also signed collaboration agreements with UNESCO and has a strategic alliance with the FUCADHU Foundation for human development in the Americas and the Caribbean for the implementation of programs, projects and activities that help the comprehensive advance of the most vulnerable countries, communities and populations.

Nicolas Muela is also a representative of the Andalusia Confederation of Entrepreneurs whose objective is the advocacy of business and corporate rights in Andalusia before Spanish institutions and bodies, either public and private or domestic and international.

The confederation fosters activities conducted by the Iberian-American Gastronomic Academy, also based in Seville and founded in 2009 by the hand of the Doña Maria de las Mercedes Foundation. It has representatives in Andalusia, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Peru.

The academy president is Rafael Anson –also chairman of the Royal Gastronomic Academy of Spain- with Nicolas Muela as associated president and Fernando Quartin (Brazil) and Maria Podesta (Argentina) as deputy presidents.