The Juan Brito Foundation (FJB) has reported this Thursday that it is joining the demonstration on April 20 that will take place throughout the Canary Islands to demonstrate against the current mass tourism model. The FJB has among its objectives the defense of the material and immaterial heritage of Lanzarote, heritage directly affected by said tourism model, since it "erases the references."
"Lanzarote has been erasing its landscape, its essence, its vital tempo until it becomes a white label of itself; it is our commitment to recover those references to reposition ourselves on the international tourist map and in our own history," they indicated in a statement.
"We understand that there are plenty of reasons" to support this citizen initiative, they point out from the Juan Brito Foundation. "The commitment to the recovery, conservation and dissemination of the tangible and intangible heritage of Lanzarote is part of our DNA," they added.
Thus, it has highlighted that "the FJB contributes from its programming and its activism to a Lanzarote of the 21st century based on itself, on its essence, on what makes it recognizable, instead of abandoning itself to a system that consumes territory and erases the references."
For the Foundation, the citizen initiative of April 20 "fulfills this objective of the FJB, especially when the heritage aspects that made Lanzarote an island of international reference have lost weight to the point of making it unrecognizable." In addition, it has been questioned: What distinguishes today a tourist area of our island with the south of Tenerife or Gran Canaria? What do we offer that has value in itself to choose Lanzarote over a charter to any resort in the Mediterranean or the Caribbean? Is that loss of personality, of references, of heritage 'compensated' with an acceptable standard of living for all the people who inhabit Lanzarote?"
Thus, for them "the prevailing tourism system in Lanzarote for decades (massification of the territory) harshly affects the material and immaterial heritage of the island. Lanzarote has been erasing its landscape, its essence, its vital tempo until it becomes a white label of itself; it is our commitment to recover those references to reposition ourselves on the international tourist map and in our own history."
Finally, the FJB emphasizes that "the concept of socialization of heritage that it promotes is a strategy for the integral defense of Lanzarote, in addition to a way of integration for the foreign population that seeks and needs heritage references, material and immaterial, to actively contribute to the social development of our island."
