SPORT AND CULTURAL ACTIVITIES

In addition to its comprehensive program of learning courses, CIESE-Comillas has prepared afternoon extracurricular leisure and cultural activities for its students to enhance their immersion in the Spanish language.

• Cultural excursions: Altamira, Santilla del Mar, Guggenheim Museum, Picos de Europa, etc.
• Cultural workshops: Cooking, theatre, painting, dancing, etc.
• Spanish language and culture film library
• Gastronomic routes

Among the most popular options: Spanish and surfing, Spanish and sailing, Spanish and golf, Spanish and multi-adventure, Spanish and the Camino de Santiago, Spanish with a Latin American rhythm, among others.

Other activities in our proposal: water sports (surfing, windsurfing, swimming, deep-sea diving, kayaking, etc.), adventure sports (hiking, mountain climbing, rock climbing, spelunking, canyoning, bike trails, horse riding, etc.), court sports (tennis, paddle tennis, golf, etc.), cultural leisure, spas, etc.

Outings, excursions and trips

The section named Classroom Without Walls – University Students is an academic and cultural expansion program that is intended to expand the teaching of the Spanish language, culture, territories and societies beyond classrooms in the setting of university studies taught in the CIESE – Comillas. This provides direct experience and participation that are considered the pillars of our students’ learning process.

By travelling and making tours we try to introduce, evaluate and identify key interpretations that contrast the geographic reality with the image built by culture over time. In this sense, geographical excursions are presented as a window into direct experience, to check the knowledge we already have and obtain new ones on the geographical, historical and cultural reality of Spanish-speaking territories, from near the farthest. The program aims to facilitate the mobility of students view, physically and intellectually, with places and different themes, building comprehensive capacity, multidisciplinary analysis as well as creativity and innovation in the treatment of cultural aspects.

We pretend to interpret the landscape, the natural and the built one, in which we can find the legacies of the past and present uses, places of interest and historical elements, diverse and valuable artistic and cultural expressions and, ultimately, a legacy territorial, with its key culture and, of course, with their language, their varieties, and their unique ways of naming things and places, so expressive of the customs and lifestyles. Therefore, it is not only to analyze the territory and its spatial components, but also to pay attention on everything that has invested him, the cultural background decanted with the course of history. Thus, as the landscape has its own formal and dynamic language, and talks about the relationship between a company and its environment, also in our tours we will deep into the geography of the Spanish language.

Organization and planning

Scheduled departures in the Classroom Without Walls - university are not just recreational outings, but they are tools of training objectives, that involve the preparation of a technical report by the Centre to plan the activity, the logistics, places, times, itineraries, theme, materials and activities to do with students, adapting to the interests and level of each group.

Modalities

The conditions to make the exit can be varied, from half or full day visits to a city and its museums, libraries, cultural centres,etc, or full-day tours through the territories of the región to weekend excursions and even weekly for longer formats, allowing closer and knowledge of Spanish cultural diversity. It has an extensive collection of outputs and specific materials.

Field Notebooks

The coordinator of the Classroom Without Walls program, in collaboration with the teachers responsible for each exit, is responsible for developing specific supplementary materials for the activity, wich are called field notebook. Its function is to assist and enrich the student's experience during the exit providing information about places and subjects to be discussed.