ear partners of the International Web Conference on The Legal Impacts of COVID-19 in the Travel, Tourism and Hospitality Industry: As Rector of the University of Salamanca, it is a great honour to be able to address all of you, jurists from Europe and Latin America. Two continents united by a common problem: the COVID-19. I must congratulate the organiser, our Portuguese colleague, Dr Carlos Torres, and all the legal experts who have analysed the legal consequences of this virus, especially in the travel and tourism industry. This is, without a doubt, a pioneering initiative and I am particularly glad to announce that the University of Salamanca has participated in it. Our university was founded in 1218, placing it among the four oldest in Europe. It has a clearly Latin American vocation evidenced by the variety of programs that our professors teach at every faculty on this content, and the large number of students who come to graduate or to get a doctorate degree from our university. I am also grateful for the high online participation as an alternative to the meetings at this difficult moment. This crisis has obliged to all of the universities in the world to find different options to give the lessons, and the University of Salamanca has implemented many measures of virtual teaching and professors are facing the problem with responsibility. If there is a sector which has especially been hit by this worldwide pandemic, it is the tourism sector. It is a hallmark for our country with almost 84 million of tourists in 2019, but I have to say that in the recent decades it has increased in every country in the world; this sector has become a real engine of the economic, social and cultural development. I am sure it was not a coincidence that the first decision taken by a Contentious Administrative Court about confinement was the No. 1 Court of Santa Cruz de Tenerife (27 February 2020), that ratified the sanitary measures taken by the “Health Service”, which quarantined the guests of a Hotel after a European tourist was positive in COVID-19. D
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