94% of the surface of the Timanfaya National Park is a reserve, an area closed to public use to "ensure the conservation of its natural values." These ecosystems that the National Parks law tries to preserve are an extraordinary source of knowledge that should be disseminated to the public.
This is how the conference of Pascual Gil, director-conservator of the Timanfaya National Park, began last Friday, October 25, who explained how the Lanzarote park is managed and the work it is currently developing.
Since the approval of Law 30/2014 of the Network of National Parks, the management and organization of the national parks of Spain corresponds to the governments of the autonomous communities, in this case to the Ministry of Ecological Transition and Energy of the Government of the Canary Islands, which is responsible for the Timanfaya Visitor and Interpretation Center - the park's dissemination epicenter - and the Tremesana and coastal routes, which are free of charge and can only be done by prior reservation.
A guide specialized in the interpretation of the nature of Timanfaya explains the geological, cultural, floristic and faunistic foundations to groups of nine people who walk through the volcano and come into direct contact with this fascinating natural environment. "We have reinforced these visits and we are reaching 8,000 users per year," explained the director of Timanfaya.
According to a recent public study carried out by the national park, visitors demand more information and to be able to take a walk during their visit to the Montañas del Fuego tourist center. This confirms the proposals that the Timanfaya National Park has been promoting since 2014 so that access to the Islote de Hilario is also done by bus, transforming the current parking lot into a walking and contact area with the natural environment.
Other works that the park has developed is an application that records and geolocates the environmental incidents that occur and an inventory of crops: "We are conducting genetic studies on fig varieties and we are going to locate the owners" to recover and maintain the 1,100 fruit trees that remain in the park. Work is also being done on a renewable energy project and a virtual classroom that will make available to the public all the research work carried out in Timanfaya since its declaration as a national park.
"Recovering historical memory"
Carmen Romero reviewed the 18 historical eruptions of the Canary Islands, much more complex and heterogeneous than the image we have of them. Those of Timanfaya in particular "teach us a lot because they are not very retouched by erosion and we can see the deposits well": they had the highest explosivity index of all the Canary Islands eruptions and generated the surface covered by the most extensive lava in the entire archipelago. The ashes went 60 km into Fuerteventura and created floating islands 5 km long in the sea.
There are many sources that relate the management of the 18 volcanic crises documented in the Canary Islands: we know that there were 17,000 evacuees, 25 dead and 12 injured, mostly from collapsed houses. And it is that "since the 16th century the authorities have taken measures against the eruptions", scheduling preventive evacuations. That sacralized society that considered the eruption a divine punishment, knew how to manage the crisis "as a public calamity."
The best example is the last eruption of Lanzarote in 1824. Fearing a second Timanfaya, the authorities took care to "measure the progression of the eruptive fissure" and created working groups, as the Special Plan for Civil Protection and Emergency Attention for volcanic risk in the Canary Islands (PEVOLCA) does today. The hermitage of San Rafael de Teguise (Lanzarote) thus became the first volcanological observatory in the Canary Islands.
"We canaries have never turned our backs on the volcano, the population knew what they had to do," recalled Dr. Romero, emphasizing the need to "recover our historical memory."
