On a recent visit to a town in Tenerife, a friend told me the story of the small hermitage in the neighborhood where his father grew up. Apparently, this modest construction suffered serious damage as a result of the Spanish Civil War and the successive looting it suffered during the post-war period. A few years later, my friend's grandfather took the initiative to organize a popular raffle to restore the small temple, whose value for the people of the neighborhood transcended religion. That was a social meeting point, a landscape reference for the place where it is located, but above all, an element with an important sentimental charge for many generations. The raffle went ahead and with the money obtained the bell could be bought, the floors were laid and new gates were placed. "It is this bell, it is these floors and it is these doors that you are seeing," he told me, pointing proudly towards the hermitage.
Each place has its history, however small, and San Bartolomé is no exception. We have important heritage values that we want and must protect, conserve and disseminate. This is the reason that has led us to develop, in recent years, a series of actions aimed at making our municipality a reference in Lanzarote for highlighting beauty, history and uniqueness.
The imminent approval of a new aesthetic ordinance to regulate and homogenize the image of buildings gives continuity to the initiative launched in the industrial area to establish an appearance consistent with the image of the island. We want to be an example in caring for the Lanzarote brand, articulating the instruments at our disposal to achieve a balance between urban planning, aesthetic and environmental values of the island.
In the commitment to caring for this small house that is Lanzarote, it is necessary to continue seeking answers in the debate on the economic model. We are just over 163,000 people living on an island that last year received almost 3 million tourists, so it is urgent to put on the table brave solutions that guarantee a sustainable future through diversification and the defense of quality.
Sustainability is also protecting our identity; hence the work we are developing to identify, inventory and classify the heritage assets found in our municipality. A few weeks ago, the City Council commissioned the drafting of a municipal catalog that updates heritage protection and merges the tools for the conservation of movable and immovable property, intangible manifestations of aboriginal populations, of popular and traditional culture with historical, artistic, architectural, archaeological, ethnographic, bibliographic, documentary, linguistic, landscape, industrial, scientific, technical or any other cultural nature. In parallel, we will develop a citizen participation program to collect the proposals of our neighbors in this regard.
What we intend to do by taking this important step forward is to guarantee maximum protection to those elements of the municipality whose value is incalculable. We cannot remain on the sidelines of the deterioration caused by abandonment or the passage of time, nor should we look the other way every time a heritage attack is perpetrated on our island. Each act of vandalism against a site, a historic house or a protected space is an attack on the heritage we have received.
Mills such as that of Don Juan Armas, recently acquired by the City Council for its recovery and restoration; historic houses such as the Casa de Los Carrasco, in La Florida, in whose rehabilitation we also collaborate; the eras and cisterns of the municipality or the archaeological and paleontological zones have remained as silent witnesses of the history of our town. We are facing true treasures whose survival we must guarantee for future generations. Otherwise, they will hardly be able to understand where we come from, who we are or how we have gotten here.
Heritage is memory and it is pride. Milan Kundera said that to liquidate peoples "one begins by stripping them of their memory", in such a way that the people "forget what they are and what they were". Out of respect for the memory and dignity of our grandparents, but also out of responsibility to our children and grandchildren, let us keep this rich heritage alive.