The Spanish Astronomical Society held its XIII Scientific Meeting in the beautiful historical Spanish city of Salamanca on 16-20 July 2018, as one of the activities related to the VIII Centenary of the Universidad de Salamanca.

There was a plenary session dedicated to “Athena and synergies” on the afternoon of 17 July: it started with a talk by Francisco J. Carrera (IFCA, Spain) on “Athena and Spanish (and Portuguese) participation” in which the revolutionary capabilities of the mission were shown, as well as its main scientific objectives, ending with a summary of Spanish (and Portuguese) participation in Athena. In this context, María Díaz Trigo (ESO), Marc Ribó (U. Barcelona, Spain) and Miguel Pérez Torres (IAA, Spain) gave talks on synergies between Athena and ESO, Cerenkov Telescope Array (CTA) and Square Kilometer Array (SKA), respectively, showing how the combined capabilities of Athena and those facilities will be transformational in many fields, ranging from active galactic nuclei to clusters of galaxies and from active stars to exoplanets.

Complementarily, Maite Ceballos (IFCA, Spain) explained some of the outreach activities of the Athena Community Office in a talk on the morning of the same day entitled “From school to space: experience of astronomical outreach at IFCA”.