The Cabildo de Lanzarote celebrated the closing ceremony of the project ‘Saltamos las Barreras’ (We Jump Over Barriers), an initiative aimed at students with functional diversity that consolidated its validity during the 2025-2026 school year as an indispensable tool for social inclusion and health.
The community gathering took place at the Insular Space for Well-being and Social Inclusion, located in Puerto del Carmen, bringing together students from Enclave Classrooms, Special Education Centers, Adapted Vocational Training, and regular classrooms, along with their families and professionals from the sector to put the finishing touch on this edition.
Guaranteeing equality in sports
With a historical trajectory of thirteen years of collaborative work promoted by the educational community, to which the Tinguafaya Association later joined, this 2025-2026 edition had a budget of 72,000 euros. Thanks to this investment from the Cabildo, 205 people with motor, sensory, or cognitive disabilities of all ages from across the island directly benefited. This initiative arose to mitigate historical exclusion in classrooms and respond to the educational gap suffered by these young people, especially in Enclave Classrooms, whose official curriculum does not include Physical Education.
The president of the Cabildo, Oswaldo Betancort, highlighted the profound social value of this day, pointing out that “sport constitutes a fundamental right for all students without distinction.” Betancort noted that “this project not only positively impacts the integral health of people with special needs but also represents a channel for transmitting essential values such as solidarity, collective effort, and absolute respect for individual differences within a fully inclusive society.”
For her part, the Minister of Education, Ascensión Toledo, emphasized the importance of permanent institutional cooperation with the social fabric, expressly thanking that “Physical Education is an indispensable tool to reach the maximum motor potential of young people, building a more accessible environment through coordinated work with schools and families.”
Along these same lines, the Minister of Social Welfare, Marci Acuña, highlighted the program's direct impact on the family environment, recalling that "these actions guarantee that necessary respite, as well as essential emotional support for caregivers." Acuña emphasized the commitment of his department to continue supporting transversally all those policies and projects of the island corporation that promote personal autonomy, equal opportunities, and the real improvement of the quality of life for people with disabilities in Lanzarote.
Age-adapted programming
For the development of the program in safe environments, ten qualified professionals were hired, coordinated with teaching staff and volunteers. The free activities were divided between school hours and extracurricular hours, ranging from adapted swimming and child psychomotricity to adapted sports and physical conditioning by age groups.
Through play, the project promotes personal autonomy, self-esteem, and socialization among young people, a task supported by institutional audiovisual material that highlights the joint effort of the centers, families, and the Institution.