The Senate unanimously approved this Wednesday in the Education and Sports Commission the motion of Nueva Canarias (NC) for the Canary Archipelago to be correctly located on textbook maps and not below the Balearic Islands, as is usually done. Throughout her speech, the senator from NC, María José López Santana, lamented that "ignorance and lack of knowledge is constant in textbooks, on websites of the European Union and weather maps".
In this regard, López Santana has expressed her concern since "for peoples to understand each other they have to know each other" and the lack of knowledge of the geographical situation of the Islands "makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for the enormous difficulties we face in the Canary Islands to be understood from the Peninsula due to the great distance that separates us, not only the entire Archipelago with respect to the mainland, but also between our own islands".
The nationalist parliamentarian has argued that "knowing the geographical situation of the Canary Islands is essential to understand who we are, what we are like and what our challenges and needs are". Thus, she explained that "the Canary Islands are next to the African continent next to the Sahara and that determines us, as it determines us to be islands in the Atlantic halfway between three continents, with which we have had and have cultural and historical relations. We are people of the sea, of volcanic land, of wind, and we know about isolation".
"It's not a whim"
For all this, López Santana has demanded "rigor and veracity" in the maps, "both in the situation and in the distances or toponymy, and especially in textbooks, which are the basis of the education of boys, girls and adolescents". For the senator from NC, correcting the errors with respect to the location of the Islands in the didactic materials "is not a whim", but rather "our geographical situation is part of our identity and cannot be undermined or distorted by graphic issues", explained the senator, who in turn denounced that, for example, the RTVE website that illustrates the weather continues to place the Canary archipelago below the Balearic Islands.
Finally, the senator was satisfied with the approval of the motion, in which the Government is requested to address the Autonomous Communities to recommend that, in the exercise of their autonomy, "they take care to ensure the rigor of textbooks and other curricular materials" with respect to the elements of the physical and political geography of the Canary Islands, but stressed that "there is still much work and pedagogy to be done".
In this line, she recalled that she also registered an initiative before the Joint Commission of the European Union (EU) regarding the "adaptation of the elements of the physical and political geography of the Canary Islands in the official publications of the European Union", but lamented "the slowness" of the parliamentary processing and announced that "she is not going to wait any longer" for the moment of its debate to arrive and that she will go "directly" to the community institutions to try to resolve this anomaly "as soon as possible".