The president of the Cabildo of Lanzarote, María Dolores Corujo, has recently visited the house on Fajardo Street in Arrecife to supervise the progress of the rehabilitation works that are being carried out and assess possible alternative uses of the property.
Accompanied by a team of technicians from the Heritage Service of the first island institution, Corujo toured the rooms of the house and checked the condition of the building, acquired by the previous government group for 1.6 million euros and in which the Cabildo of Lanzarote has had to spend more than two million more euros on rehabilitation projects.
To this amount, Corujo pointed out, we must add the operating expenses generated in the Centers to equip and maintain the two lateral warehouses, “which some insisted on calling the Archaeological Museum of Lanzarote”, which amount to 280,000 euros.
“This whim has already cost several million euros to all the people of Lanzarote, who in return have obtained a building in a deplorable state that will require investing several million more for the restoration to guarantee the conservation of the property and its restoration, prior to any use to which it is destined", Corujo pointed out.
“That is why, and because we must be extremely scrupulous and cautious with the management of public money, even more so in a moment like the present, we are analyzing the best alternatives so that this property has a public use and, above all, rational. With the option of the Archaeological Museum discarded, because the General Plan of Arrecife does not contemplate it, we must give meaning and content to the millions of euros already squandered and, above all, to those that remain to be spent", he added.
Protecting and preserving heritage but "not in a sloppy way"
The president of the Cabildo has defended the need to protect and preserve the historical, cultural and ethnographic heritage of the island but not in a "sloppy" way. “It is the origin of our customs and traditions, the value of our personal and social relationships, what constantly reminds us of where we come from and the dimension we have as a people, it is our best sign of identity. And all this, which has an incalculable value, is dignified in a space conditioned for it, in an infrastructure that meets the appropriate conditions and following the procedures established by the accredited bodies, and not in a sloppy way, hastily and running before the imminence of an electoral process, in the two lateral warehouses of a property that is in this state, not even temporarily, and acting outside the only body that has the power to validate a Museum as such", he stated.
In this sense, Corujo recalled that the Law of Cultural Heritage of the Canary Islands establishes that the creation of public museums of insular scope is carried out by the department of the public administration of the Canary Islands competent in the field of museums “which, to this day, has no record of the creation of any Archaeological Museum in Lanzarote”.
