The Grec Festival of Barcelona is the city’s main annual date with theatre, dance, music, circus and other stage arts. This is a long-standing festival that will take place for no less than the 36th time in 2012. Over the years, moreover, the Grec has become not only the most outstanding summer cultural attraction in Barcelona, but also a key reference on the European festival calendar. The festival’s title is taken from its main venue, where the opening sessions invariably take place: the Teatre Grec, or Greek Theatre, on Montjuïc, an open-air theatre built for the 1929 Universal Exhibition. Promoted by Barcelona City Council, the Grec Festival also involves a considerable number of the city’s private impresarios and promoters, who produce and organise many of the shows on the programme. The festival is financed by public money, by income from sponsors and by revenue from ticket sales. With a history stretching back thirty-five years, the Grec Festival of Barcelona has become the leading producer of shows in Catalonia. The event pursues a dual mission: to support local production and produce outstanding works by Catalan artists and companies; and to provide a window onto the world, presenting the most interesting works from around the world in Barcelona. Indeed, the festival is today the city’s leading showcase for performances of shows produced abroad. Since 2009, moreover, the Grec Festival of Barcelona has worked with the Avignon Festival, the Athens-Epidaurus Festival and Istanbul International Theatre Festival, all fellow members of the Kadmos network. Kadmos was set up to enable these festivals to organise joint production and promotion projects for artists and shows, to exchange experiences and to share political and social reflections about the region that is home to all four, the Mediterranean.