The office of the Biosphere Reserve of the Cabildo de Lanzarote has organized, for next Saturday, April 11, a botanical walk through the vicinity of the Guinate valley, in the municipal district of Haría. The activity will be guided by agricultural engineer Marta Peña, and agricultural engineer Jaime Gil, both authors of the work Cultural Uses of Herbs in the Fields of Lanzarote along with Raquel Niz, already deceased.
The activity is part of the annual training program Let's Talk about the Biosphere. Those interested in participating must complete the form. The capacity is 40 places, which will be awarded in strict order of registration. The counselor of the Biosphere Reserve, Samuel Martín, invites to participate in a walk “of easy route and in which we are going to learn a lot, from the hand of two of the greatest scientific authorities in wild flora of the Canary Islands”.
The walk will have its meeting point at the Guinate Sociocultural Center, at nine in the morning and will run through the area for four hours, during which Peña and Gil will inform about the ethnobotanical culture associated with the native plants of Lanzarote and generated after centuries of connection with the rural environment. Both their vernacular names, some with aboriginal sound, others with Portuguese, Castilian or Moorish ancestry, as well as the uses associated with each of them, form a heritage of great value.
The authors of Cultural Uses of Herbs in the Fields of Lanzarote, whose second volume has been edited by the Biosphere Reserve, as well as other collaborating individuals, develop works to rescue traditional oral peasant knowledge, which runs the risk of being lost due to the socioeconomic changes of modernity and the consequent generational gap.
