The mayor of Tías, José Juan Cruz, spoke this week on Radio Lanzarote-Onda Cero to explain how the municipal plan is progressing to manage the growing influx of visitors to the newly popularized space of Las Grietas, located on the inter-island road LZ-35 and dependent on the council and the Cabildo of Lanzarote.
The Tías City Council has indicated that there are around 29 requests to go and record or shoot commercials in the environment. "It is mandatory that they have the authorization of the council," said the mayor. "Our intention is that in a place that does not have the pertinent authorizations and that may suffer deterioration is to deny them all," he added. José Juan Cruz did not rule out the possibility of closing this space and drafting a project to organize it, with the approval of the Island Council and the Environment Area.
In recent years, this space has become popular due to social networks and has created a call effect. Dozens of vehicles and hundreds of visitors have piled up for months in a dirt siding next to the road that connects San Bartolomé and Tías. After leaving their vehicles, they move, either crossing the road on foot or using an underground passage, to the Las Grietas space.
The increase in influx has caused vehicles to interrupt the usual traffic on the road and several people have been injured in this space, which is not enabled to receive visitors. Sometimes, even the firefighters have had to intervene.
Faced with this situation, the mayor of Tías chose to close the unpaved siding that allowed vehicles to park next to the road. In addition, as we already announced in La Voz, he also commissioned a geologist to carry out a report to determine if the Las Grietas area can be visited as until now or if its condition poses any danger to visitors.
The council has also informed all the councilors to remove from social networks and websites the two trails, one municipal and one insular, that include this space as a place of passage. "It is not advisable that this is being advertised in the. In addition, we have also sent a message to the Cabildo because we understood that it should not be advertised because we understand that the environment can be further damaged," defended José Juan Cruz.
At the same time, to prepare for possible episodes of rain, the Tías City Council opened a "open trench" so that the water runs along the sides of the road and does not affect traffic. "We have to have the water passages ready in case the water arises, that it runs through the natural channels and the pipes that the road has," he added. However, given the closure of the siding and the opening of these ditches, drivers are leaving their vehicles parked between the road and the ditches to visit the space.
"We had a meeting with the Environment area of the Cabildo to see the pros and cons that exist in the environment," said the mayor of Tías during his intervention in the radio program Buenos días, Lanzarote. Cruz Saavedra stressed that one of the main problems of this space is the lack of parking.
