There are people who don't need to raise their voices to be heard. It is enough for them to remain firm, like the rocks that resist the onslaught of the waves, to remind us that dignity can also take the form of silence.
Ana Carrasco and Quino Miguélez belong to that lineage of women and men who have known how to safeguard the island from a place deeper than mere profession, that of conscience.
For decades, both have been the heart, body, and soul of the Biosphere Reserve Office of the Cabildo de Lanzarote. In a time when noise and speed seem to sweep away everything, their work has had something of poetic resistance in the preservation of what is essential.
They have not only defended an ecological idea or an administrative category, but a way of being in the world, a territorial ethic that reminds us that taking care of the land is also taking care of ourselves and the legacy we will leave to future generations.
Anyone who has lived in Lanzarote knows it: this island doesn't surrender itself to just anyone. You have to listen to it, even suffer it, to deserve it. Ana and Quino have loved it with that mixture of tenderness and anguish that is only reserved for what truly hurts. They have felt its deterioration like a dagger between the ribs, when the cement advanced or the sea filled with waste that was previously invisible. They have defended every piece of lava, every jable bush, every curve in the road, as if the very soul of the island were at stake. And perhaps it is.
Their journey, as if it were the punishment of Sisyphus, has been an almost infinite slope, which they have had to ascend again and again with the burden of a gigantic weight on their backs.
They have known the harshness of suspicion, the political maneuvers, the loneliness of the honest official who makes the powerful uncomfortable. Because defending the land in Lanzarote has never been a free gesture: it has meant challenging interests, setting limits, saying "no" where it was convenient to remain silent. And that comes at a price.
They have been accused of everything imaginable: of bias, of dogmatism, of serving foreign causes. But the truth, which is stubborn, has no folds. The only cause they have served has been that of the island. While others sought profitability, they transmitted coherence. While some changed their discourse as the wind blew, they remained firm in the same place, like those solitary lighthouses that show sailors the way back home.
In their offices, they often worked with the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. Threats of closure, dismissals, smear campaigns... None of that managed to break their purpose. To each attempt to tear them down, they responded with more rigor, with more studies, with more arguments, with greater dedication. The more wind, the more chains, they must have thought, because they knew that their responsibility was not to a government or to a set of initials, but to a territory that transcends them. And in that there is something deeply ethical, even heroic, to resist without fanfare and to uphold decency when everything pushes towards cynicism.
I have been fortunate enough to see them in action. To observe the attention with which they listen to the people of the countryside or the sea, how they dialogue with researchers, how they look at the landscape with that mixture of concern and affection that only those who know they are part of it possess. In their gestures there is a silent pedagogy with which they teach, without intending to, that the future of the island does not depend on grand speeches, but on the perseverance of those who care for it every day.
And yet, they have not always been treated fairly. Too often they have been asked to justify something that should be unquestionable: their commitment to Lanzarote. They have been measured by the yardstick of political distrust, as if protecting the common good were an act of suspicion. But what really bothers people about Ana and Quino is not their ideology—which has never been a banner—but their coherence, which, in times of cynicism and hypocrisy, is subversive.
Even so, they have continued chipping away. Without noise, without revenge, with resignation. They have continued walking on the burning lava of criticism and misunderstanding. And thanks to that, Lanzarote is still, today, an island with a soul. Because there are places that survive not by decree, but by the tenacity of those who love them unconditionally.
Today, when there is so much talk about sustainability and green policies, it would be useful to remember that there were those who practiced these values long before they were fashionable slogans. That while strategic plans were being designed or indicators were being calculated, Ana and Quino were already there, measuring the real pulse of the earth, defending the fragile balance between progress and memory.
In a world where immediacy prevails, they embody the opposite: perseverance. They have been, without intending to, the guardians of the territory. Not because they watch over it, but because they understand it. And in that understanding there is love, but also sacrifice. Lanzarote owes them more than it suspects: the sanity of its planning, the integrity of its environmental narrative, the honesty of a gaze that has never surrendered to self-interest.
Therefore, this text is not intended as just another eulogy. It is a call to gratitude. Because recognizing them is not only doing justice to two proper names, but also reconciling ourselves with the best of ourselves as a society. In times of discredit and uproar, we need role models who remind us that it is still possible to act with ethics, humility, and integrity.
Ana Carrasco and Quino Miguélez are people who beautify the world, and that is a strange virtue, practically reserved for another territory, the poetic one. I have no doubt that, with the tranquility that the passage of time brings, history will judge them as they deserve, and the trade wind will carry the echo of their names from Órzola to La Geria, from Famara to Femés, and every volcanic stone, ravine, sandpit, or puddle will preserve something of their essence.
But until then, while they and others whom they have inspired continue to exist, Lanzarote will not only be a landscape, but a promise of coherence and beauty.
Therefore, from this very modest vantage point, I firmly request, as a Lanzarote citizen proud of this island and its people, that the Cabildo of Lanzarote honor them with the granting of its most precious recognition: the Jameo de Oro. Not as a symbolic gesture, but as an act of moral reparation. Because if there is a way to honor those who have defended the island without expecting anything in return, it is to publicly recognize that their work has been decisive in preserving the dignity of this territory.
Let's not wait until the end of days for that, lest it be too late and we have to utter the same words that Dr. Juvenal Urbino, in "Love in the Time of Cholera," spoke to Fermina Daza as he lay dying: "only God knows how much I loved you."