About us
Instituto Cervantes is a non-profit organization founded by the Spanish Government in 1991. Its mission is to promote the teaching of Spanish and the co-official languages of Spain, as well as to foster knowledge of the cultures of Spanish-speaking countries.
Instituto Cervantes is present in almost 90 cities in more than 40 countries on five continents. In Los Angeles —the sixth center opened in the United States, after Nueva York, Chicago, Albuquerque, the Observatory of Languaje and Hispanic Cultures at Harvard and the Seattle classroom— it is constituted as a non-profit organization whose mission is to give prestige to Spanish as a language of knowledge and to disseminate Hispanic culture in all its aspects.
Given the identity of the city of Los Angeles -the film capital of the world-, the Cervantes Institute will dedicate a special effort to promote the audiovisual arts in Spanish, but its purpose encompasses all manifestations of the Spanish language, which in the 21st century has undoubtedly become a language of influence: sports, music, literature, science, business, gastronomy, politics, and the visual arts. There is no field of human knowledge that does not owe an important part of its progress to the Spanish language and to the people who speak it.
Instituto Cervantes of Los Angeles aims to collaborate with public and private cultural institutions in California, especially those involved in the dissemination of Hispanic language and culture.
The Institute performs the following tasks:
- Organizes Spanish courses at different levels and forms: general language, specific skills, etcetera. It also offers courses in Catalan, Basque and Galician.
- Organizes DELE Spanish exams and issues official DELE Spanish certificates and diplomas to its students.
- Advises and accompanies centers dedicated to the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language (ELE) to standardize their evaluation and quality procedures.
- Offers professional development classes for Spanish teachers.
- Supports researchers in Hispanic languages and cultures.
- Promotes cultural activities and events in conjunction with other organizations.