On Saturday 17 October, at the port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, a symphony orchestra backed a tenor and a Queen guitarist. Earlier, at 19:30, there had been a ceremony with three astronauts. It is not what you expect to see at a commercial harbour, and it is how Starmus chose to open its eighth edition.
The festival, themed “The Search for Truth” this year, runs from 17 to 22 October across Tenerife and La Palma. At the opening, the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication went to the Artemis II crew (Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Jeremy Hansen), whose April mission flew around the Moon for ten days. An award also went to Ridley Scott. The concert that followed, according to RTVC, featured Andrea Bocelli, Sarah Brightman and Brian May with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Las Palmas. Rosa Dávila, president of the Cabildo de Tenerife, and Alfonso Cabello were among those at the official inauguration.
The public-facing part is the Starmus Camp in Plaza de la Candelaria, four days from 17 October with free entry to talks, workshops, exhibitions and performances. First-day speakers included neuroscientist May-Britt Moser and astronaut Chris Hadfield, plus an astrophotography workshop and a Queen tribute. On Monday 19, per RTVC, Glover spoke about space travel, and Kam Ghaffarian, co-founder of Axiom Space, said his company is organising commercial trips to the Moon and Mars expected in about two years. That is a company statement, not a verified timetable.
Sessions continue until 21 October at the Pirámides de Arona. On 22 October the festival moves to La Palma, where the first Starmus was held fifteen years ago. The programme also includes a new Starmus Jane Goodall Earth Medal for people who protect the planet and biodiversity, announced in December 2025.
Here it is worth pausing on what is missing. The sources we read give no figures for attendance, visitor spending, public budget or capacity. Tenerife and La Palma have hosted big-draw events for years, but this festival has an unusual profile: partly free admission, a worldwide line-up, and an audience that partly travels for it. If the question is what it really leaves the islands, today the answer is a question mark, not a percentage. The test will be the report that organisers and authorities publish after 22 October: how many rooms were filled, how much local spending, what it cost and who paid.
There is also something harder to measure. Astronomy is one of the reasons the Canaries show up in international scientific conversations. A festival that puts Nobel laureates and astronauts in a public square for free does something no accounting sheet captures well: it brings science within reach of people who live here. Whether the 2026 edition can show that with data, and not only with good pictures, remains to be seen.
