“I want to welcome [Shen Yun] to my city,” Mr. García said. “I think it’s a pride for the many hundreds of thousands of Bilbao people to host such an artistically and culturally wonderful show. The whole show was magnificent.”

He added enthusiastically that other audience members in the theater have already told him that they, too, enjoyed the performance very much.

The New York-based Shen Yun Performing Arts was founded by leading Chinese artists who had fled persecution in their homeland by the Chinese Communist Party. In the decades since the regime’s takeover, traditional Chinese culture faced near-complete destruction.

Now in America, Shen Yun artists have made it their goal to revive this lost culture and bring it back to the world through a series of dance pieces and solo performances, the beauty of pre-communist China.

In the years since its establishment, Shen Yun has grown to become the world’s top classical Chinese dance and music company. Currently, its eight equally-sized companies are touring simultaneously around the world.

Reflecting on the suffering of the Spanish people at the hands of the “criminal and totalitarian ideology that is communism,” Mr. García expressed that for half a century, the “murderous, terrorist organization” had also tried to curtail the freedom, culture, and cultural expressions of Spain that it did not agree with.