It has been two months since that historic April 20, when the Canary Islanders gathered, not to remember that catchy song by Celtas Cortos, but to fight for what is their land, which is increasingly being turned into an amusement park dedicated to tourists. Something that already worried the Gran Canaria painter Manolo Millares, and that he made clear in one of the numerous epistles he shared with his great friend César Manrique, where in his own words he wrote: “...I am afraid. I am afraid of not finding one day that kind of unreal paradise, or of finding it flooded with strange ruddy characters, and old Scandinavian paralytics...” (letter from Manolo Millares, Letter ... , December 1968), where in some way it was a sentence to what would happen sixty years later in the archipelago.
And the 20A will no longer only be remembered for the chorus of a song, but the day of the uprising of a people tired of being seen by those who govern them as simple puppets that can be controlled. And it is that, erroneously, many people have come to think that these are mobilizations against tourism, but what is really sought is to stop the massive amount of them, and that with it comes a total destruction of what at some point made the islands unique, and that if this snowball is not stopped, they will become any resort in the world.
This defense was already disseminated by Cesar Manrique, in that sad paper with the desolate title "Lanzarote is dying", in which he made clear the message of activism that so marked his last years, seeing how his masterpiece was attacked by terrorists who used bulldozers as weapons, to achieve only a monetary benefit: "....they are annihilating the love that was there in the beginning. The only thing valid for them is the success of selling in masses and earning millions...” (César Manrique, 1986). Something that would be seen in the demonstrations in Los Pocillos, in which he mobilized the people of Conejero to stop the disaster of the construction of the hotel on the beach of the same name and that would mark a before and after in the history of Lanzarote, where young and old would fight for the well-being and future of the island.
Now, this fight will not be through a mobilization that will guarantee this change, we will have to continue fighting, so that finally the slogans “Canarias has a limit” and “Canarias is not for sale”, are heard by those responsible for what is happening because forty years ago it was achieved, now that we are more, and we have more means, let's become the new fighters, against those that Manrique called "speculators” . Let's fight for what was so hard to build does not become a concrete forest, let's fight for what our islands are, let's fight for our identity, as the singer Carlos Bruñas, Cruz Cafuné, said, “out of pride, because it is our fucking house” .