Agencia EFE, Spain’s international news agency, will conclude its 75th anniversary celebration this week with photo exhibitions in the Colombian cities of Barranquilla and Medellin.

The “EFE: 75 Years of History” exhibition was inaugurated in March 2014 at the Luis Angel Arango Library in Bogota, traveled to Latin America’s leading cities and is now returning to Colombia.

The exhibit looks at the recent history of Ibero-America and also features images of historic importance, such as the meeting between Francisco Franco and Adolf Hitler at the start of World War II, as well as photos of Celia Cruz, Cantinflas, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Che Guevara.

The photographs will go on display starting Monday at the Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla, where the Catedra Europa, a meeting of intellectuals that draws leading political, social and cultural figures each year, is set to open.

Among those invited to this year’s forum, which runs until Friday in the Caribbean city, are former Colombian President Andres Pastrana, Cuban musician Chucho Valdes and Agencia EFE director general for Latin America Alfredo Aycart.

On Wednesday, the exhibition “EFE: 75 Years in Photos, 25 Years Building Latin America” will be opened by Agencia EFE President Jose Antonio Vera at the Casa del Encuentro of the Museo de Antioquia in Medellin, marking the end of a year-long series of commemorative events.

The exhibit in Medellin, the capital of Antioquia province, is being sponsored by Spanish construction company FCC and the city’s Secretariat of Culture.

Among the 50 historic photographs in the exhibition are images of the aviation accident that killed legendary tango singer Carlos Gardel at the airport in Medellin and 25 photos tracing the evolution of infrastructure across the region.

The exhibition looks at everything from the construction of the Panama Canal to the smart buildings in Medellin, a city that is poised to become the Ibero-American capital of innovation, science and technology in 2020.

The exhibit, which runs until May 18, is being housed at the same museum that holds the collection of Colombian master Fernando Botero.

The photographs also document political, social and economic transformation in Ibero-America, looking at Colombia from the 1940s to the current peace negotiations between President Juan Manuel Santos’s administration and the FARC guerrilla group.

EFE, the world’s leading Spanish-language news agency, was born in 1939 in a Spain devastated by the Civil War and began its expansion in the Americas in 1966 with the opening of its first bureaus in the region.

Today, EFE operates in 180 cities in 120 countries, employing more than 3,000 news professionals from 60 nationalities.

Agencia EFE opened a bureau in Colombia in 1968 and inaugurated its regional editorial office in 2007 in Bogota, where it processes and distributes reports prepared by the bureaus in the Americas, spanning an area from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.

Today, Colombia is Agencia EFE’s operations center in the Americas.

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