Liberación Canaria has announced the promotion of a neighborhood initiative aimed at recovering the old gunpowder magazine in Güime, in the municipality of San Bartolomé, as a space for public utility, citizen participation, and community use.
The proposal is born with the objective of "opening a serious, transparent, and orderly process that allows clarifying the legal, administrative, and patrimonial situation of this old infrastructure, currently without effective social use and associated for decades with abandonment and institutional indecision."
The organization considers that Güime "cannot continue coexisting with a deteriorated space, without a clear destination and alien to the real needs of the town."
Therefore, it proposes a roadmap based on three principles: legal rigor, institutional leadership, and neighborhood participation.
The first step, according to them, will be to promote a collection of signatures among the residents of Güime to convey to the San Bartolomé City Council the social will to recover this space for the general interest.
From Liberación Canaria, they understand that "any action must start from a visible, orderly neighborhood demand supported by the affected population."
"This is not a symbolic claim, but the beginning of an institutional process that will allow transforming a citizen concern into an administrative file, public agreements, and concrete solutions," they assure.
The second phase of the initiative will consist of formally requesting the San Bartolomé City Council to lead the necessary efforts to clarify the registry ownership of the land, its cadastral situation, its urban classification, possible existing environmental or landscape protections, and the administrative background related to previous attempts at transfer, recovery, or change of use.
Liberación Canaria considers it "essential that the City Council, as the administration closest to the people of Güime, assumes the political and administrative direction of this process."
In the event that the land remains linked to the General Administration of the State, the Ministry of Defense, INVIED, State Heritage, or any other state body, "the City Council must formally request the free transfer of use or, where appropriate, the transfer of ownership for public, neighborhood, environmental, cultural, or community purposes."
Likewise, the organization proposes that the Cabildo of Lanzarote "get involved in this initiative as an island institution, supporting the municipal petition and collaborating in the study of possible formulas for the rehabilitation, conditioning, and enhancement of the space".
The recovery of the old powder magazine "should not be understood solely as a local demand, but as an opportunity to dignify an environment, reinforce citizen participation, and recover for public use land that is part of the memory and social landscape of Güime".
Once the legal situation is clarified and the availability of the space is guaranteed, Liberación Canaria proposes to open a participatory process so that the residents themselves can propose and prioritize the future uses of the old powder magazine.
Among the possibilities to be studied could be neighborhood meeting spaces, green areas, sociocultural projects, local memory areas, youth initiatives, intergenerational activities, or any other use compatible with current regulations and with the real needs of the town.
Liberación Canaria emphasizes that this initiative "is proposed in favor of recovering abandoned spaces, demanding institutional transparency, and defending that decisions about the territory must count on the voice of those who inhabit it".
“The future of the old powder magazine should not be decided from indifference or from offices far from the reality of the town. Güime must be heard and must actively participate in defining the future use of this space,” the organization points out.
With this initiative, Liberación Canaria "reaffirms its commitment to a useful, close policy focused on the specific problems of the Canary Islands municipalities". The objective is that the old powder magazine "ceases to be a symbol of abandonment and can become a dignified, useful space at the service of present and future generations".