After a year of stoppage due to the pandemic, La Villa de Teguise returns to celebrate its patron saint festivities in honor of Nuestra Señora del Carmen. This Friday, the opening speech was given by Juana María Hernández Delgado, a resident of the town. An event that was held in the Santo Domingo Convent, which was filled with family, friends and neighbors who supported the speaker on such a special night.
Juana María Hernández was born in Teguise into a humble family of nine siblings. She was a very happy girl, running and playing through the cobbled streets of the old capital of Lanzarote. Like any girl her age, she went to school where she not only learned to write and read, but also to embroider, and in her free time she enjoyed playing with her friends the traditional games of the time and almost without realizing it she reached adolescence where the walks began arm in arm with her friends through the Plaza de La Villa and surroundings, taking a discreet look at the boys who were camping around there. And between walk and walk waiting for some crush to arise to get the man who over the years would become the travel companion.
Juana María Hernández has always been a very committed woman, participating in all the social and cultural groups in Teguise. Participating from a very young age with verses in the May novena, in the theater with the sisters Manuela and Esperanza Spínola, she was a member of the polyphonic choir of the Villa de Teguise, the Reading Club, etc.
The speaker explained that when she received the invitation from the Councilor for Culture and Festivities Nori Machín to act as speaker, she reflected and accepted since she has always been sitting in front of the stage all her life and why not go up to it and stand in front of the public.
At the end of her speech, the mayor, Olwaldo Betancort, and the Councilor for Culture and Festivities, Nori Machín, presented her with a commemorative plaque and a bouquet of flowers. Next, the Villa de Teguise polyphonic choir, directed by Professor Nuvi Tavío, performed three songs to the rhythm of bolero and habanera. Later, the Lanzarote tenor, Pancho Corujo, accompanied on the piano by Professor Juan Francisco Parra, intervened. They began with some lyrical fragments, continuing with three compositions of Canarian root with piano arrangements such as Ocho Rosas, La Noche en Arguineguín, Mazurca, ending with the traditional pasodoble Islas Canarias, which brought the most sonorous applause of the evening with the public standing who did not stop applauding the tenor who, very excited together with his pianist, gave thanks again and again.
Oswaldo Betancort and Nori Machín presented them with a sculpture of the Diablete de Teguise and Miriam Hernández, presenter of the event, was given a bouquet of flowers.