Málaga hosts 103rd European Youth Parliament session at Maristas school

On a Sunday in late October, the Maristas school in Málaga filled with young voices speaking English across a dozen committee rooms. They had come from across Europe—the best debaters and thinkers selected from national competitions held over the previous year—to participate in the 103rd International session of the European Youth Parliament, a gathering that had never before taken place in this southern Spanish city.

The European Youth Parliament itself is nearly four decades old, founded in 1987 with a straightforward mission: to cultivate the next generation of European leaders by teaching them to think critically, debate respectfully, and work across borders. It is not a mock parliament in the theatrical sense. The organization takes its work seriously, selecting only the most accomplished young delegates from national sessions to attend these international summits. What happens in those committee rooms matters to the people in them.

This particular session was part of something larger—the Euro-Mediterranean Youth Summit, a broader initiative running from October 23 through November 3, the first time such a summit had been held in Málaga. The timing and location were deliberate. Málaga, a city on the Mediterranean coast with deep historical ties to both Europe and North Africa, offered a natural meeting ground for young people grappling with the continent's most pressing questions: migration, economic inequality, climate change, the future of the European project itself.

The structure of the day reflected decades of experience in how young people learn to lead. There were group dynamics exercises designed to build trust and break down the initial awkwardness of meeting strangers. There were the committee sessions themselves, where participants divided into thematic groups to research, debate, and draft positions on contemporary European and global issues. There were moments built in for reflection—time to step back and think about what they were learning, not just about policy but about themselves and each other. By the end of the week, there would be a final session where conclusions would be presented and debated, a chance for the work of individual committees to be tested against the broader group.

What struck observers was the atmosphere. This was not the forced enthusiasm of a school field trip. The young people were genuinely engaged, genuinely collaborative. They worked in English, which meant that even the language itself became a tool for building common ground. A teenager from Poland and one from Portugal and one from Greece, all communicating in a shared tongue, all invested in finding solutions that made sense across their different contexts.

Maristas Málaga was not new to hosting such gatherings. The school had served as a venue for EYP sessions twice before—in 2008 and again in 2024. But this third time carried particular weight. It signaled something about the school's identity and values: a commitment to educating young people not just as Spanish citizens or Andalusian residents, but as Europeans. The school's emphasis on multilingualism and on what it calls European citizenship education was not abstract. It was embodied in moments like these, when its classrooms became a space where the future of the continent was being actively debated by the people who would inherit it.

The organizers of the European Youth Parliament were effusive in their praise. They noted the professionalism with which Maristas had managed the logistics, the genuine engagement of the school community, and the quality of the working environment that had been created. These things matter. A summit is only as good as its setting, and Málaga—with its school, its location, its openness to hosting such gatherings—had proven itself ready for the role.