Let's look at the cloudy sky with hope again

October 28 2018 (21:44 WET)

Not so long ago, one of the most intense joys of this city was the rain. Seeing it rain, in a place where water almost always arrived by boat, became a true feast for the senses: the crackling of the rain, the smell of wet earth - which made the air a food -, the landscape stretched out under the clouds. Rains of joy, joy of resonant canals, of full cisterns, of summers with reserves assured for family day to day.

Those water festivals weren't that long ago. However, in this Arrecife that they are leaving us, in this tired Arrecife, the reality is very different. There is almost no memory of the rains of joy. The happy gaze of those who received the water with open pipes and alcoves is no longer there. Now what we can see are frightened eyes and fear. Now we feel the desire, due to bad rulers, for the winter to be dry and the autumn a new summer. That a city like Arrecife desires - sincerely - that it does not rain, is a symptom of some serious illness that should be named. Is Arrecife a sick city today? The neglect of some and others has weakened the city, which today prefers to live with its back to the water so as not to suffer its ravages. Ravages of the same water that only a few decades ago was the greatest blessing!

Arrecife's disease comes from neglect and abandonment. It is not possible for a sanitation network designed in 1950 for just thirty thousand inhabitants - conceived from the technology of the time - to respond to the needs of a population five times greater and seventy years later. Arrecife's disease is also found in the loss of traditional technologies full of wisdom: closed cisterns condemn that same network to receive, when it rains, the rich capture of water provided by roofs and terraces. We also diagnose Arrecife's disease from unsustainable urban development: the streets that were created for twenty single-family homes today support the presence of buildings with twenty homes each. Arrecife's disease has arrived by building in the alluvial zones of the traditional ravines, of the natural drains of the Island itself. And no one has wanted to sit down and think in the short, medium and long term about contemporary urban planning for the management of rain, for the management of sewage. The most recent interventions in water matters in the capital - that of the Government in 2007, that of the Government and the Cabildo in Argana in 2011 - have not managed to correct the very serious problem that the city suffers every time it starts to rain with a little more force than usual - and just at the moment when precisely the unusual seems to become the new norm.

I believe, modestly, that the time has come for a definitive and profound change. It is time for a change of model. The time to implement a new paradigm for Arrecife in what has to do with water. We must become a city that is capable of designing and projecting its own hydraulic infrastructure, with an adequate and capable dimension, that knows how to magnetize innovative and profitable technologies, and that manages to turn historical problems such as those of Cuatro Esquinas, Portugal or Gómez Ulla into that, into a memory of the past. Arrecife has the obligation to plan its water management for the next fifty years, because no one can doubt that these are fifty decisive years for the capital and for Lanzarote. Europe, Spain and the Canary Islands are waiting to provide funds that once and for all solve Arrecife's problems with the management of rainwater and sewage.

The people of Arrecife deserve now, from now on, a city that takes advantage of its condition as an island meadow to create, in the old runoff, the spaces for coexistence and leisure that a modern and habitable city needs. Arrecife will look at the winter skies with joy again, and will await with enthusiasm the arrival of the rains to see how the level of its «Water Paths» rises. The joy of the rain will be joined by the fact that these natural paths will serve to reunite in a community continuity the neighborhoods that the absence of planning contributed to separate. Does it ring a bell? It is about intervening in the spaces that nature itself has already endowed with meaning to put them at the service of the enjoyment of citizens.

Let's dream of those «Water Paths» that are transformed into a green lung for the capital, let's make outdoor leisure areas for young and old a reality, let's build together free and open spaces that relieve a massified city. Let's make the city beautiful, pleasant, friendly and close: it's as simple as offering the rain a passage to the sea again.

I'm talking about dreams, yes, and illusions, yes, but they are much closer than it seems. They are not castles in the air, but real, possible, assumable and transforming projects. Projects thought out and designed by experts, built by everyone, to improve Arrecife and the well-being of its people.

Projects that will turn Arrecife into a worthy Capital of the Biosphere Reserve. The city with the best quality of life in the Canary Islands. A capital of which we, the people of Arrecife, are proud. A capital that is a benchmark in the sustainable treatment of water. Projects that will involve a great effort, and even a great inconvenience while they are developed, but that will make Arrecife the great Canary city of the future. Let's do it. Let's Lanzarote Arrecife! Let's look at the cloudy sky with hope again!

Echedey Eugenio, Canary Coalition Candidate for Mayor of Arrecife

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