Metal poor stars The role of CUBES

In this contribution I provide an overview of the study of metal poor stars, with an emphasis on the efforts that are on-going to find large number of these rare objects. These efforts will provide, in the next few years, an interesting number of targets for which it will be desirable to have a chemical inventory, as complete as possible. In this respect CUBES, providing access to the near-UV region provides a unique opportunity to access some abundance indicators that have no counterparts in other spectral regions available from ground-based observations. I also take the opportunity to encourage the community to reflect on the possibility of placing a copy of CUBES on a telescope in the northern hemisphere. This contribution is not intended to be an exhaustive review of the field, but aims at stimulating interest in near-UV observations of metal poor stars.