SPOTLIGHT ON CATALONIA

Staying a steady course through the storm

Catalonia weathered the financial crisis that hit Spain hard, and kept its research metrics in surprisingly good shape. How did it do it?

By Anna Petherick

Around the turn of the century, Catalonia, a semi-autonomous region in the far northeast of Spain, went to great lengths to grow high-quality science within its borders. It offered generous salaries and tenure to elite researchers from across the world, and built several state-of-the art research facilities. “From 2000 to 2008, there were amazing increases in public funding of research — something like 10% a year,” says Josep Martorell, the Catalan government’s director of research from 2011 until February of this year. Those efforts were bearing fruit, and Catalan science was looking forward to the years ahead.

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