La Ricotta organizes activities of various kinds, with the aim of offering a new and dynamic cultural programme to the comarca, with an intergenerational approach. Although we conceive all the activities we organize from an educational perspective, the Events constitute a peculiar category, as they are conceived as a bridge between the academic world and the comarca. More specifically, there are two categories of events: Academic Events and Open Events.

The Academic Events are aimed at graduate students and researchers from universities and research centres. They fulfil a dual role. First, they propose and promote a different idea of scientific events: in addition to pursuing the highest scientific quality, addressing frontier research topics with high-level scientists and with particular attention to young researchers, they foster cooperation and the exchange of ideas by providing an informal environment, and they are designed to optimize economic resources by offering, at the same time, board and lodging, as well as transportation between Santiago de Compostela airport, the Ourense train station, and the event venue. The underlying idea is rooted in two convictions:

• participation should not depend on the availability of a personal travel grant or, in the case of graduate students, on the availability of the supervisor’s travel grant, or, more generally, on the financial resources of the home institution. There are several reasons, entirely unrelated to scientific quality, why a researcher may find themselves unable to attend a scientific event, especially when it is of long duration, or forced to choose a limited number of events in which to participate. For this reason, at La Ricotta we propose a model that combines scientific quality with the reduction—up to the complete removal—of economic barriers to participation, without increasing the organizational costs of the event;
• it is possible to optimize the available economic resources while, at the same time, not only offering a scientifically stimulating environment, but also providing board and lodging. To achieve this goal, we offer accommodation in the form of comfortable tents, equipped with inflatable mattresses and sleeping bags. In light of the first experience in 2025, with the organization of the school The Disordered Universe, we can state that the informal model we propose makes it possible, with the same level of investment, to organize a more structured event, of longer duration and offering more services.

The second role of the Academic Events is to enable the organization of cultural activities for the comarca throughout the year, in two ways: during each academic event, participants who are fluent in Spanish or Galician will be involved in activities open to the general public, which are grouped under the Open Events; furthermore, the organization of academic events will be carried out through the Cultural Association La Ricotta, a non-profit association that will reinvest the proceeds in programmes, courses, workshops, and meetings addressed to the people of the comarca throughout the year.

The Open Events are events aimed at people from the local area, jointly organised with participants in academic events. In general, they are organised throughout the entire duration of an academic event and are intended to bring researchers into direct contact with people from the local area. This can take place both in traditional formats such as talks, with ample space for questions, and in the form of workshops or experiments, involving the audience in a more active way. The topics addressed may be related both to the general theme of the academic event and to the research line of each of the researchers who agree to take part in the open events, as well as to other scientific or social topics with scientific content, on which those researchers have real expertise. The underlying idea is to maintain a stable flow of knowledge between the academic world and the local area, focusing primarily on communicating the approach and the mental habit that, in research, makes it possible to formulate increasingly precise and answerable questions, and to take the small steps that lead to the accumulation of knowledge.