Playa Honda is a rich space, of coexistence between different cultures, that forms a community united from the diversity that exists under the common denominator of living here, in Lanzarote and the Canary Islands. 20 percent of the people who live in San Bartolomé are from a different origin than the state and 19 percent belong to another Autonomous Community*, with a strong presence of the Galician and Andalusian communities.
With everything, we can presume that Playa Honda, where the identity of the town is in constant progress and transformation, is and has been an example of rich and plural coexistence. This has been especially contributed by the community work carried out by different groups such as El Patio and Tiemar, which intentionally and positively have favored coexistence in society, promoting participation in the community through meeting and relationship.
Far from taking advantage of these potentialities and working with interculturality as a premise, favoring dialogue, integration and mutual enrichment, the cultural policy of the City Council of San Bartolomé seems to be absent, disconnected and directed towards electoral interests of the government group.
The difference in enthusiasm and institutional effort put into the organization of recent festivities in Playa Honda, the Feria del Sur and the Canary Islands Day, demonstrates this. For the organization of the Feria de Abril, a typical festival of Andalusia, the place of origin of the councilor of the festival area, the City Council of San Bartolomé gave all its collaboration, availability and resources for a private company to celebrate it for four days and in style. For the organization of the Canary Islands Day in Playa Honda, the festival area informed the neighborhood of the impossibility of holding it on the 30th, indicating that they should adjust to the institutional agenda and celebrate it one day before, on May 29. When they communicate their disagreement and their firm intention to celebrate the Canary Islands Day on the date, the City Council not only refuses to modify the institutional agenda but also refuses to provide municipal collaboration for any act that the neighborhood associations wanted to organize on May 30. This is just one more example of the little effort and contempt that areas such as festivals make in valuing our culture.
It is understandable that there are citizens offended by the substantial difference in treatment of the government group between one festival and another and between some applicants and others. When organized civil society requests disinterested institutional collaboration, the demands are rejected and ignored, but when it comes to issues with a direct electoral benefit, the PSOE deploys all the necessary resources and rolls out the red carpet. It is impossible for comparative grievances not to occur.
It is this segregation and this double standard that hinders the generation of multicultural networks between all the origins that populate San Bartolomé while placing its citizens as the only victims since, today, PSOE, CC, PIL neither promote the culture of this land, nor support the associations of the municipality, nor generate a cultural policy in the municipality that is non-partisan, equitable and planned beyond four festivities a year. San Bartolomé needs a cultural policy aware of the territory in which it is located, of the heterogeneous human community that populates it and that builds bridges to interculturality and social cohesion.
Paula Corujo, councilor of the Somos Lanzarote group in the City Council of San Bartolomé