Salamandra is a family of open-weight large language models developed by the Language Technologies unit of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-LT). The base models cover 35 European languages and code, with extra weight on Spain's co-official languages. They are published on Hugging Face in base, instruction-tuned, quantised and translation variants, and the ALIA models come from a Spanish government-funded project. Organisations can download the weights and run them on their own infrastructure or fine-tune them.
The salamandra-7b base model is released under the Apache 2.0 licence. BSC is a public consortium with its seat in Barcelona, with no non-European parent company. Because the weights are distributed as files, running them locally involves no hosted service from the publisher, so hosting and data protection stay with the organisation. For a European organisation, the models offer an EU-developed alternative to proprietary language model APIs hosted in the United States, at the cost of operating the infrastructure.