NUMEROUS household names across the globe, including a sizeable number of Brits, have won Prince of Asturias Awards between the first-ever prizegiving in 1981 and 2013 inclusive, or Princess of Asturias Awards from 2014 onwards when the 'Spanish Nobel Prizes' were renamed after King Felipe's daughter, Leonor.
Here are a few of the best-known celebrities – and companies and organisations – who have picked up the Royal prize in Spain in the past 37 years.
Internet, chimps and cancer care
British science award recipients this century include biologist and primatologist Jane Goodall (first picture), a pioneer in the study of chimpanzees; Tim Berners-Lee, the 'father of the World Wide Web'; and oncologist Tony Hunter.
Tennis, golf, cycling, Formula 1 and basketball
Famous Sports Award winners have included the late, great Spanish golfer Severiano Ballesteros, Wimbledon winners Martina Navratilova, Arantxa Sánchez-Vicario and Steffi Graf, British athlete Sebastian Coe, US cyclist Lance Armstrong, Formula 1 drivers Fernando Alonso and Michael Schumacher, Mallorca-born tennis star Rafa Nadal, and NBA brothers Pau and Marc Gasol.
From black holes to Harry Potter
Concordance Awards have been won by the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking (second picture), Harry Potter creator J K Rowling, staff at the Fukushima nuclear plant, and Palestinian political activist and literary theorist Edward Said, the world's number one critic on post-colonial writing and prolifically quoted in literature students' essays.
Activists, politicians, astronauts...
Late South African president and fierce anti-Apartheid activist Nelson Mandela received the International Cooperation Award in 1992, as did Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat in 1994, astronaut-turned-science minister Pedro Duque, Al Gore, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Red Cross, and even Wikipedia.
The Handmaid's Tale and Portnoy's Complaint win prizes
Mario Vargas Llosa (Conversations in the Cathedral, Bad Girl, The Feast of the Goat), Günther Grass (The Tin Drum) Doris Lessing (The Golden Notebook), Arthur Miller (The Crucible, All My Sons, Death of a Salesman), Susan Sontag (The Way We Live Now, In America), Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy, The Brooklyn Follies), Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale), singer and songwriter Leonard Cohen, and Philip Roth (American Pastoral, Portnoy's Complaint) have all won Letters Awards.
Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Plácido Domingo...
The late soprano Montserrat Caballé, tenor Plácido Domingo, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan (fourth picture), flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucía, film directors Pedro Almodóvar, Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola, British architect Norman Foster, and Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer – who designed São Paulo's MASP art museum and Biennal exhibition hall have won Arts Awards.
Nature and history
Brits who have won the Social Science Award include historian Mary Beard, author Karen Armstrong, and nature documentary presenter David Attenborough.
Yes, even Google
CNN News, the British Council, Italian author Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose), American war correspondant James Nachtwey, the National Geographic Society and Google have all won Communication and Humanities Awards.
SPAIN once again leads the field in the number of organ transplants carried out – for the 27 year running – and donors are becoming more and more frequent. In 2018 alone, donors rose in number by 37%, from 2,183 to...
SPAIN'S world-famous 'super-surgeon' Dr Pedro Cavadas has successfully reimplanted a four-year-old boy's toes ripped off when he became trapped in a fairground ride. The child's foot end up wedged...
A JUDGE in Barcelona has upheld a nursery school's decision not to enrol a child whose parents opted not to vaccinate him in line with a dangerous new trend sweeping the USA and gradually creeping into Spain and the...
SPANISH president Pedro Sánchez reveals he has been working since November on contingency plans for four key areas in case of a 'hard Brexit', in which the UK leaves the European Union without a deal on March...
SPAIN once again leads the field in the number of organ transplants carried out – for the 27 year running – and donors are becoming more and more frequent. In 2018 alone, donors rose in number by 37%, from 2,183 to...
SPAIN'S world-famous 'super-surgeon' Dr Pedro Cavadas has successfully reimplanted a four-year-old boy's toes ripped off when he became trapped in a fairground ride. The child's foot end up wedged...
A JUDGE in Barcelona has upheld a nursery school's decision not to enrol a child whose parents opted not to vaccinate him in line with a dangerous new trend sweeping the USA and gradually creeping into Spain and the...
SPANISH president Pedro Sánchez reveals he has been working since November on contingency plans for four key areas in case of a 'hard Brexit', in which the UK leaves the European Union without a deal on March...
PARENTS in Almería whose eight-year-old son was killed by his stepmother have raised €12,572 for the Red Cross and a children's cancer association through a charity event held in a square named in tribute to the...
THE last two remaining inhabitants in a Teruel-province village are the stars of the show in a new TV advert. Martín and Sinforosa have lived in La Estrella, a Hamlet with a population of two, all their lives, and have...
THE first baby to be born in Spain in 2019 is Carolina María Madrona Quispe, who came into the world just as the chimes started at exactly midnight and is her parents, Jesús and Verónica’s second child. They spoke...
THE last Parliamentary session of 2018 was set to include a decree to axe telephone boxes – but MPs have decided to keep them after all. It was expected they would scrap the section of the law which makes it mandatory...
SPAIN’S post office has agreed to take on 11,200 employees and improve salaries for all existing staff in 2019 and 2020, averting strikes planned for December 21 and Boxing Day. Correos, as the State-run postal...
A SCHOOLBOY who returned a wallet he found full of money has won the annual Community Safety Award in Fuenlabrada (Madrid). Guillermo Rodríguez Giraldo, 12, found a purse on the Street with a large sum of cash and an...
“IF ANYONE is working for world peace right now, it’s you,” Spain’s president Pedro Sánchez told the nation’s troops abroad in the traditional government Christmas message via video conference on Christmas...
A HOMELESS man in Amposta (Tarragona province) handed in a wallet containing €1,000 in cash this week – and the owner wants to find him so he can thank him. The street-dweller gave the wallet to a barmaid and asked...
