We are immersed in a restructuring and planning of our economies after a year and a half of paralysis due to the Covid-19 pandemic. After the vaccination process, which is essential to achieve a certain level of health security, it is time to work on alleviating the economic and social crisis that the Canarian business, commercial and family fabric has suffered. All public administrations are working against the clock in order to identify the strategic axes that will drive not only economic recovery, but also the transformation that our capital needs, whether human, financial or social.
From this context, novel projects have emerged, such as the commitment to a new vision of active tourism committed to our environment and long stays; the determined investment in renewable energies and energy sovereignty; or the recovery of heritage ethnographic spaces of great cultural and historical interest. All this, with the aim of laying the foundations for the Canary Islands of the present, but most importantly, of future generations.
However, while new visions of the Canary Islands we want to be were being put on the table, we have witnessed the resurgence of old projects that were supposed to be overcome, discouraged or simply have no place in this new post-pandemic cycle. I am talking, for example, about macro port and airport projects.
Since it was announced that the EU's recovery plans would represent the largest investment stimulus since the Second World War, and that these would be managed by the States and, failing that, the regions or Autonomous Communities, projects from the last century emerged from the hand of various agents, both with public and private responsibilities. In the peninsula we have the cases of the expansion of the airports of El Prat in Barcelona and Barajas in Madrid, strongly questioned for their environmental impact. In Lanzarote, the expansion of the César Manrique airport has created an intense debate due to AENA's forecast to move a passenger traffic between 8 and 14 million people more than the figures it already presented before the pandemic (a real barbarity!). In Tenerife, the future Port of Fonsalía is sold as a strategic and logistical mega-project that complements and decongests the Port of Los Cristianos, in divergence to the allegations of all social and environmental groups that question its viability. This has recently been stated by our colleagues from NC in Tenerife, who propose a way to manage the problem of Los Cristianos without the need to spill more cement on our coasts, that is, the Port of Granadilla.
A few months ago, a political and social debate was generated on our island as a result of the occurrence of the regional deputy of CC, Oswaldo Betancort, to ask the Minister of Public Works of the Government of the Canary Islands about the viability of Playa Blanca hosting a cruise port. In other words, he proposed, de facto, a second cruise port on an island of 845.9 km 2 that would attract tourist activity derived from this type of vessel. Obviously, the reactions were immediate, with his own party colleagues in Arrecife being the first to question such an idea with statements such as
