In this era of large spectroscopic surveys of stars of the Milky Way, pipelines need to be tested and validated against a set of well-known stars. The Gaia FGK benchmark stars (GBS) are among the preferred samples of reference stars. They consist of a small but carefully selected sample of stars whose parameters are derived consistently and homogeneously. A series of papers has been published that discuss the definition and evolution of the sample of GBS. Here we summarise this work and provide our current list of stars with associated parameters which are recommended for validation and calibration purposes for stellar surveys.