The result of years of frenzy in construction, in adapting the environment to our needs in an arbitrary way and, even having a pattern established and accepted by all, the figure of César, it was decided to prioritize everything and leave the landscape for the end... That's how it's going.
I believe that for all of us it is a need that we do not constitute as a demand, because precisely the agglutinator of the conejera society is missing, that which was and is no longer, César Manrique. Taking as a pattern the extraordinary symbiosis that César achieved with the landscape and human activity, I believe it is essential to resume the path marked and act with a clear roadmap in our procedure.
Architecture projects buildings, but once they have finished being built, they inevitably become landscape, good or bad, but it will be landscape. A bench, a trash can, a lamppost, a bus stop, the cobwebs of cables that pass through our facades, all that and a thousand more things become landscape. The conejero -in the capital or in the jable, while working or when he is on the beach- and tourism, are pieces that together make up our landscape.
From Teguise I want to propose a collective reflection based on the vision of our landscape. And I also propose that we ask ourselves the following question: Do we agree with the landscape that surrounds us, and with the one we are generating, and are the corrective measures appropriate?
I suppose that countless proposals will come out, I intuit it and I affirm it because I know my people and the love of my land. I believe that the real work will consist of prioritizing the corrective actions, but sincerely the team that will make up the new area of our City Council, the Landscape Council of the City Council of Teguise (with a multidisciplinary advisory team), will propose that "Cesarización" of the interventions in public works and will act transversally to all the municipal areas. Because, as we said before, everything makes up a landscape.
We are with the drafting of the new maintenance and gardening contract of the municipality, in which we cannot ignore the maintenance and care of what we have -only in Costa Teguise more than 10,000 palm trees-, but also the creation of shadows through plant mass in urbanized areas and in the peri-urban environment, an authentic reforestation.
Trees are key to lowering the temperature of cities, it has been shown that they are between 2 and 4 times cooler, and seen how the weather is going it is time to start making shadows where we can sit and have a good time talking with a friend or greeting a neighbor.
“Therefore, urban forests are emerging as one of the most successful initiatives to address the environmental footprint caused by human activity: they allow the elimination of harmful pollutants, reduce noise, improve temperatures, mitigate the effects of climate change, supply different products and renewable energy, protect water sources and prevent soil erosion and flooding”, reports the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
And the sea? In the Canary Islands, being islands, we do not have a coastline because it belongs to Coasts -or Ports- and those organizations mark their limits, their conditions; they impose their standardized landscape lines and criteria for the entire country, without taking into account the slightest respect for our landscape. In this way, fishing villages see how their sea, their coastline, is taken away from them.
And it seems that we are already resigned to it.
We have reasons to be very proud of Teguise, but that is not enough. In my opinion, our municipality should aspire to recover an important part of its coastline. And I am willing to debate it with clear proposals, because the Landscape does not understand Orderings that limit the territory. It does not understand lines and instead it does understand perspectives. Of visual perspectives, of environments, harmony and light.
We are obliged to understand each other with our environment, our interior landscape, the jable, the mountains, the ravines... with the landscape that we see every day when we get up and of which we are a fundamental part, both passively and actively. We must feel proud of our identity as a municipality. Above protection and management plans, we must find a common, consensual and reflective language that allows the integration of all actors in the common objective of safeguarding our landscape, our natural way of life, that which placed us as one of the best tourist destinations in the world. Today we want it to continue to be a reference for the mediating discourse between progress and landscape.
