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Registrations in Lanzarote: the Church registered 38 properties in its name, including squares and cemeteries

The central government has prepared a document with the registrations carried out throughout Spain by the Church since the Aznar reform in 1998, which also includes those of this island. For the majority, only an ecclesiastical certificate was provided.

February 17 2021 (22:13 WET)

The Church has registered 34,961 properties in Spain since the Mortgage Law was reformed under the government of José María Aznar, and at least 38 of those properties are located in Lanzarote. This is reflected in the document that the central government has just sent to the Congress of Deputies, in response to the controversy over these registrations in the Land Registry.

Registration involves recording a property in the Registry that was not registered until that moment, for which its ownership must be accredited. And in the case of the Church, it was allowed to make that registration only with an “ecclesiastical certification”. Of the 34,961 properties that it registered in its name throughout the country, 30,335 only had that certification issued by the Church itself, while only in 4,583 it provided “a different title.”

As for the type of property, some 20,000 are "temples of the Catholic Church or complementary dependencies", while almost 15,000 "are not related to these uses", and include plots, homes and premises.

In the case of Lanzarote, almost all the properties registered by the Church since 1998 are churches and hermitages, although there are also several cemeteries, a museum and even the squares linked to some of those churches.

Specifically, the Diocese of the Canary Islands put in its name the squares where the hermitage of Los Dolores, the hermitage of Nuestra Señora del Pilar and the Church of San Roque are located, all in the municipality of Tinajo. And also the square of the hermitage of Nuestra Señora de la Peña, in the municipality of Teguise.

Precisely Teguise is the one that concentrates the largest number of properties that have been registered by the Church, with a total of 18. These include the Tao cemetery, the Guatiza cemetery and the old Teguise cemetery, in addition to other properties such as the Convent of Santo Domingo.

Regarding the documents provided to register these properties, which were registered in the name of the Diocese of the Canary Islands, the majority was only with the ecclesiastical certificate. Of the 38, only in 4 another type of document was provided: in the church of San Ginés de Arrecife and in the three properties registered in Tinajo.

As for San Bartolomé, the document consulted by La Voz does not include any property registered by the Church in this municipality, which could be an omission, which, if so, would raise the total figure for the island.

Regarding the Canary Islands, the report includes a total of 532 properties that have been put in the name of the Church: 256 in the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife and 276 in that of Las Palmas. On other islands, the list also includes plots, homes, orchards and rustic farms, as is the case in other parts of Spain.

It should be remembered that this document does not include all the properties of the Church, but only those that it has put in its name through that registration process between the years 1998 and 2015. In Lanzarote, the Diocese of the Canary Islands has other properties that it has bought or that it received in its day as donations, but that have nothing to do with this list.

By municipalities, these are the properties that were registered in Lanzarote in the name of the Church, according to the report.