The European Solar Telescope (EST) is a project for a 4 meter-class ground-based telescope, to be located in the Canary Islands. The project is promoted by the European Association for Solar Telescopes (EAST), a consortium formed by research organizations from 15 European countries. EST will be optimized for studies of magnetic coupling between the deep photosphere and upper chromosphere. The project has been approved for funds by the European Union, within the FP-7 framework, to produce the design of all systems and subsystems of the telescope during the next three years. This includes the optical and optomechanical design of the telescope itself and of the instruments and their control. MCAO will be included in the optical path in a natural way to compensate for atmospheric disturbances in an optimum way. The design of EST will strongly emphasize the use of a large number of visible and near-infrared instruments simultaneously which will influence the telescope design from the very beginning. This communication will center mainly on the scientific objectives that EST will address. Generally speaking, they involve understanding how the magnetic field emerges through the solar surface, interacts with the plasma dynamics to transfer energy between different regions, and finally releases it in the form of heat or as violent events in the solar chromosphere and corona. Among the many topics of interest, one may cite, as described in the EST Science Requirements Document: small-scale flux emergence in quiet sun regions, large-scale magnetic structures, magnetic flux cancellation processes, polar magnetic fields, magnetic topology of the photosphere and chromosphere, conversion of mechanical to magnetic energy in the photosphere, wave propagation from photosphere to chromosphere, energy dissipation in the chromosphere at small and large scales, etc. The present status and future perspectives of the project will also be outlined.