Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, Mr Vinton Cerf.

The geography of a city is full of reminders that help us to find our way around it. Often, however, the name of a street is part of a city’s collective memory and the geographical references this contains may also be sentimental ones.

We are here today to name a new street in Tarragona: Internet Street.

Our city, which is so ancient and was so important during the time of the Roman empire, is a living being that has been on the move continuously for thousands of years. We are proud of the archaeological heritage that links us with Rome, Athens, Petra, Palmira, Merida and the rest but we also look to the future and accept its technological challenges with satisfaction.

Tarragona was not a pioneering city in the Internet in Catalonia, Spain and Europe for nothing. The city’s server, TINET, has brought this new medium within the range of hundreds, indeed thousands, of Tarragona people.

Even now, when this communications phenomenon has become much more widely used, the number of Internet surfers in Tarragona is still one of the highest in the European Union.

Naming a city street is not always easy. And streets are not always named after the most admired leaders of the city. Depending on how the historical winds have blown, streets have been given the names of saints or military men with little or hardly any connection with the local area.

In the olden days streets were named after the people who lived in them. El carrer Cavallers (Knights Street), for example. Or they described what was bought and sold in them: plaça de les cols, plaça de l’oli, plaça del blat (Cabbages Square, Oil Square or Wheat Square).

In the Middle Ages streets named after professional guilds were popular: thus, there were streets named Coppersmiths, Furriers, Blacksmiths, Glass Street, Haberdashery.

The industrial revolution produced names like Steam Street, Factory Street and Gasometer Street. It is therefore no surprise that today, on the threshold of the 21^st century, we in Tarragona wish to name a street after the most common word on the lips of millions of people all over the planet.

As I said earlier, in Tarragona, the word "Internet" has special connotations and many different meanings for many of our citizens.

Recently we have read that in Spain the Catholic surfers of the Internet are trying to find a patron saint for it. For many years the name of Santa Tecla has been mentioned along with other, less likely, candidates.

Curiously, Santa Tecla is the patron saint of our city, while the name Tecla reminds us of a key (tecla in Catalan) of the keyboard (teclat in Catalan). It goes without saying that I, as mayor of Tarragona, wholeheartedly support the candidature of our patron saint.

In any case there is every justification for Internet Street since the Internet is a vitally important means of communication. It is transforming the world in the same way that the discovery of fire or the invention of the wheel or printing press did.

There will surely be a before and after the Internet. Internet makes global and simultaneous intercommunication possible and puts it within the scope of the masses. It is a previously unseen phenomenon that contributes definitively to the globalization predicted by Macluhan.

Like everything else, however, it can be used as a communications tool in a good way or in a bad way. For this reason I urge all the Internet surfers in Tarragona to use it in a positive way, to inform people around the world about our city and to promote the highest values of solidarity, coexistence and peace in an international community that, for the first time, is not built by governments but by individuals.