The 2025–2026 season at the Círculo de Bellas Artes carries a clear celebratory spirit. In 2026, the Círculo de Bellas Artes will commemorate the centenary of its building, designed by Antonio Palacios, which, since its inauguration, has stood as a symbol of modernity and a meeting point for culture in Madrid. Over the course of a hundred years of history, its halls have hosted debates, exhibitions, concerts, screenings, and performances that have shaped the intellectual and artistic life of the city, projecting their influence far beyond our borders.

Past, Present, Culture is the motto accompanying an anniversary that avoids nostalgia. On the contrary, the centenary celebration will be grounded in reaffirming a commitment that remains intact: to offer an open, plural, and transgressive space where free creation and thought can always find a home. The programming will honor the legacy of those who made the Círculo an essential cultural hub while also proposing new ways of imagining and constructing what is yet to come.

A Centennial Building

Martín Chirino, whose centenary is also commemorated in 2025, will be the focus of some of the main exhibitions of the season. In 1983, the Canarian artist became president of the Círculo and gave the institution a powerful new impetus, positioning it as an innovative reference point for Spanish culture.

In October, the exhibition Martín Chirino. Memory of the Círculo will open, followed in February by The Futures of the Past. The Círculo de Bellas Artes as a Space of Cultural Agitation in the 1980s and 1990s. The latter will highlight the renewal experienced by the Círculo under Chirino’s leadership, which transformed the institution into a multidisciplinary center uniting theory and practice.

Also in February, the exhibition The House of the Arts. Open Since 1926 will be presented, showcasing documents, plans, photographs, and unpublished pieces that will reveal details of the competition, design, and construction of the building that today houses the Círculo.

The great centennial celebration of the 2025–2026 season also includes The Owl of Minerva, a project inviting artists and collectives to intervene in unexpected corners of the Círculo; the performance In Perspective by the company El Trastero Creativo, combining contemporary dance, architecture, and music to reclaim the Círculo as a living space; and special open days with activities for all audiences that will allow visitors to explore the institution’s corridors, halls, and hidden corners.

Musically, the centenary will feature on 24 May an extraordinary concert within the Círculo de Cámara series, with soprano Lise Davidsen and pianist James Baillieu.

For the first time in its history, the Círculo’s archive will be made digitally accessible to the public, thanks to a project that opens thousands of previously unseen documents from the late 19th century to the present day. Letters, sketches, photographs, minutes, and designs will be available on the new Archive Portal, reaffirming the Círculo’s commitment to preserving its historical memory and its vocation of public service.

The Cine Estudio will program a cycle of films from 1926, representative of the silent cinema of the period, accompanied by live music.

Also of note is the relaunch of Radio Círculo, coinciding with its twenty-fifth anniversary. The station will become a platform of open, free podcasts, continuing as a reference point for understanding the most challenging aspects of the present, discovering new voices, and fostering dialogue on the issues of contemporary culture.

The Futures of the Past

With The Futures of the Past, another of the season’s main programming lines, the Círculo proposes a fruitful and emancipatory look at the past in search of more sensible futures. Against reactionary uses of history, the institution seeks to draw from it everything that allows us to move forward in constructing a more just, innovative, inclusive, and supportive future.

This task is necessarily collective. Thus, in this year marking four decades of Spain’s entry into the European Union, the Círculo reaffirms its role as Casa Europa, highlighting the transnational dimension of culture. Networks such as Culture Action Europe, the European Alliance of Academies, TEJA, and the New European Bauhaus place culture at the heart of contemporary social, political, and artistic debates across the continent, and the Círculo is proud to be part of them, reaffirming its commitment to the arts, thought, cooperation, and collective imagination as indispensable tools for building the future.

Two major exhibitions stand out in this section of the program:

• Robert Capa. Icons (opening 2 October), which will connect the photographer’s images to the historical moment in which they were taken.
• There is Oil Here! (opening 6 November), a critical exploration of landscapes defined by speed, exploitation, and combustion, guiding us in a reflection on fossil modernity and our ties between energy, body, and planet.

Possible Utopias. Visions of Knowledge in 2050 is the title of a series of six virtual dialogues in May, featuring leading contemporary thinkers to reflect on the future of disciplines such as science, urban planning, and education.

The Biennial on City and Science will arrive at the Círculo in November, dedicated to the centenary of quantum mechanics.

The Círculo will also return to producing theater and film. In the coming months, the building will become a film set for short films produced by the institution with emerging and established names in Spanish cinema. On stage, the Círculo will coproduce El borbón rojo (The Red Bourbon), the third play in Ignacio Amestoy’s tetralogy All for the Crown, and Arrebol, directed by Txemi Pejenaute, exploring the climate emergency.

In music, Il trovatore will be the focus of this year’s reflection on how the weight of the past shapes the present, following last season’s debates on social exclusion (Rigoletto) and inequality (La Traviata).

The zarzuela project Zarzuela is Future will highlight roots, traditions, and diversity as tools to construct a more inclusive society, defending freedom of expression and creation against the risks of identity-based ultranationalisms.

The program Noisy Future will celebrate the 50th anniversary of electronic music, combining theoretical debate and artistic experimentation.

In early 2026, Cine Estudio will host Spain’s first retrospective dedicated to Hiroshi Shimizu, one of the great masters of Japan’s golden age of cinema, alongside a selection of films by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a key figure in contemporary Japanese cinema. Other highlights include The Green Ray, a cycle of classic and contemporary films in restored prints, and a program around housing issues in heritage cinema.

Festival of Ideas: Labyrinths

The second edition of the Festival of Ideas will take place from 18 to 21 September, once again bringing together leading national and international thinkers. Its goal remains to bring philosophy into the streets, with a free and open program that encourages encounter, debate, and listening.

Labyrinths will be the central theme of this edition, inviting audiences to reflect on “the meanings, non-meanings, and counter-meanings of our present; on our places of confinement or refuge; on our desire for liberation; on false liberators and monsters,” as expressed by philosophers Marcela Vélez and Javier Moscoso, content directors, in the festival’s manifesto.

Alongside Madrid’s streets, the festival will have two main venues:

The Allianz Stage at Plaza de España will host conferences, conversations, performances, concerts, and a book fair, with guests including Pankaj Mishra, Michel Houellebecq, Victoria Camps, Sami Naïr, Lucía Carballal, Michael Ignatieff, and Camila Sosa.

The Círculo de Bellas Artes will host more reflective roundtables, conversations, and theatrical performances, as well as a well-being space and an area for younger audiences with family-friendly programming. Guests include Gisèle Sapiro, Manuel Vilas, Susana Monsó, Karina Sainz Borgo, Wolfram Eilenberger, Daniel Innerarity, and Clara Ramas.

The Essentials

Under the title The Essentials, the season gathers key dates: some for their longstanding tradition at the Círculo, others for their particular relevance to the city’s cultural life.

In October, the Gold Medal—the institution’s highest honor—will be awarded to writer Antonio Scurati, for the quality of his literary work and his commitment to democracy; and to Andrés Rábago “El Roto,” for his multifaceted career and incisive critique of Spanish society.

Other major highlights include Pública26 (a meeting for cultural professionals), the Continuous Reading of Don Quixote (celebrating its 30th edition), La Mesa Redonda (expanded this year beyond poetry to other literary genres), and the traditional Carnival (this year themed A Legendary Carnival) and Halloween Night of the Dead and Witches.

This winter, the Círculo will host Mythological Christmas, transforming its halls into a magical space inhabited by extraordinary creatures, stories, and symbols. In summer 2026, the Círculo will once again serve as a Climate Refuge, an open public square where citizens can take shelter from the heat, which has become a reference point of Madrid’s summer.

Science, Culture, and Education

Science and culture go hand in hand in much of the Círculo’s programming. Alongside the Biennial on City and Science, initiatives such as ConCienciArte, a science fair for students, and the cycle Science, Medicine, and Humanism, which emphasizes collaboration across disciplines, highlight this commitment.

Education is another key dimension. Since 2014, the SUR School has offered global and transversal artistic training, integrating theory and practice through a two-year postgraduate program (the Master in Arts and Artistic Professions) and a seven-month Fundamental Course. In July, the Círculo will once again hold its Summer Courses, in collaboration with the Spanish National Distance Education University (UNED).