The Teguise City Council agreed this Tuesday, in its first face-to-face session held at the Santo Domingo Convent, to approve the proposal for the Municipal Library of the Villa de Teguise to be named Nievitas Castillo Bonilla. The Corporation has decided that the new name be approved in the Honors and Distinctions Committee in recognition of the recently deceased resident of the Villa, teacher, former librarian and appreciated cultural reference.
“Nieves Castillo is and will be part of the history of Teguise and deserved recognition befitting her career and values. She was a reference for several generations, in cultural and human terms, and we all have to be grateful for her impeccable work for forty years, not only at the head of the Library but also in other activities, always at the service of the residents of the municipality,” said Oswaldo Betancort during the session, in which he recalled the heartfelt tribute that the City Council and the residents of Teguise dedicated to her last October 2019 in the Municipal Library that will bear her name.
“We have this debt with Nieves,” said the official chronicler of Teguise, Francisco Hernández, in the reading made during the session as a posthumous eulogy in honor of the former librarian, teacher and president of the Villa's Polyphonic Choir. “We hope that all cultural groups and our Corporation can give her the farewell she deserves, that from that watchtower, which is reserved for those who, like her, gave their lives for the culture of everyone else, she can see us united, so that the memory of the mission she carried out in every corner of her town never fades,” Hernández said during his speech.
Nievitas and her involvement with culture
According to the City Council, Nieves Castillo was part of the Teguise Municipal Library since its creation in 1979, although her involvement with culture and teaching dates back several years, when she already taught children in the municipality to read and write in the rooms of her own house.
At the beginning of 2013, with the opening of the new Municipal Library of La Villa, Nieves Castillo became responsible for it, continuing with a work that began in the late seventies and lasted until today. Linked to Christmas traditions, the Polyphonic Choir and theater, among countless activities, "Nievitas –as she was known among her friends– was an admired figure by all the people who had the pleasure of meeting her in any of her countless concerns," the institution highlights.
"Tireless, committed, human, cultural mother of hundreds of young people and friend of the colleagues with whom she shared a profession for four decades, Nievitas Castillo will become part of the history of Teguise forever, giving her name to a project created in 1977 as a basic instrument of education and culture, which was later transferred to different municipal buildings until occupying the current space on Clavijo y Fajardo street in the Historic Site of the Villa de Teguise," concludes the City Council.
