The founder and member of Los Amigos de Portonao, Valentín Fernández Arrocha, publishes a book entitled "Cantigas de Lanzarote". The work "treasures two hundred songs collected from our elders and comments on them as an introduction, and shows the rich wealth of Lanzarote's songbook", explains the author.
Fernández Arrocha has spent forty-seven years (since 1975) collecting material and information regarding the popular songbook and traditional oral transmission of Lanzarote. "It is about time to bring it to public light for its conservation and dissemination in general of the cultural and ethnographic heritage of the people of Lanzarote and the Canary Islands,” says the writer.
"A book of cultural memory for children, young people, students, adults, veterans and the general public of the songs and singers of this land, of our mothers, fathers, and ancestors who shaped the idiosyncrasy of our island", explains Fernández Arrocha.
The author
Valentín Fernández Arrocha (La Tiñosa-Lanzarote 1960) is a folklorist, founder and member of Los Amigos de Portonao. He is also a soloist in the audiobook: Velas y Vientos del Pasado (1987), a work that collects the history and music of the Arrecife porteño of the 19th and early 20th centuries, recovering the spirit of those sails, the winds that moved them and the men who lived facing the sea.
“May this first publication serve as a beginning dedicated to the study of the songbook of oral, traditional and popular transmission of Lanzarote. My gratitude, recognition and homage in particular to all those people who, in their immense majority, are no longer physically present, but are present in the indelible memory of the love they professed for our customs and traditions as part of them and of ourselves”, concludes the writer.