From the afternoons of ball games, families, and tranquility of the 80s and 90s to the neighbors' concern about the situations currently experienced in this space in La Vega.
There are places that one does not forget because one learned to be a child there.
For those of us who lived through those years, the Simón Bolívar Square in Arrecife was not simply a square. It was our territory. The place where afternoons seemed endless, where the ball rolled from one side to another, where children ran, played, and invented our own rules.
It was a square for families.
Historical documentation places the inauguration of Simón Bolívar Square, in the La Vega area, in 1983, after the monument dedicated to the Liberator was inaugurated a year earlier. But those of us who were neighbors do not need to consult any archives to remember what that space meant.
We lived it.
During the eighties and nineties, the square was a place for recreation, for meeting, and for tranquility. Services were attended to. The environment was familiar. Children played while our parents could be relatively calm. The elders chatted. Neighbors knew each other.
There were no mobile phones keeping us locked into a screen. There was no need to organize an afternoon of games.
We went down to the square and played.
A ball was enough. A group of friends was enough. Even boredom ended up becoming a game.
That square had something that today seems extraordinary: normality. And perhaps it is precisely that normality that we miss the most.
I am not trying to say that the eighties and nineties were perfect. They were not. Each era had its problems and its difficulties. But those of us who lived through those years know that certain public spaces retained something essential: they were places for coexistence and not for concern.
Today it hurts to contemplate certain situations that occur in spaces that were the scene of our childhood.
It hurts especially when one lives nearby and can see how the atmosphere has changed.
Because a square should not generate fear, unease, or a sense of abandonment. A square should generate a desire to go out.
To sit down.
To talk.
To play.
To meet.
A square should belong to its neighbors.
And here is, perhaps, the real issue.
It is not solely about demanding more surveillance when a problem occurs. Nor is it about pointing fingers at those who exhibit certain behaviors. It is about something much deeper: what city do we want to build and what spaces do we want to leave for our children and grandchildren.
I remember a Plaza Simón Bolívar full of family life.
I remember children playing ball.
I remember neighbors.
I remember conversations.
I remember quiet afternoons.
I remember that feeling, so difficult to explain today, that while you were in the square you didn't have to be aware of what could happen around you.
Perhaps that is why the current images hurt more.
Because when one has known a place in its best version, it is impossible to contemplate its deterioration with indifference.
I am not asking to go back to 1985.
Time does not go back.
But I do believe that we can demand that a square once again fulfill what it was conceived for: to be a place of meeting, of coexistence, of tranquility, and of life.
Let children play again.
Let families sit again.
Let the elderly converse again.
Let neighbors feel again that the square is theirs.
Because recovering Plaza Simón Bolívar is not just about improving its gardens, repairing its elements, or keeping it clean.
It is about returning something much more important: tranquility. The tranquility of knowing that our children can play.
The tranquility of sitting on a bench.
The tranquility of meeting a neighbor.
The tranquility of looking at a square again and recognizing it as part of our home. I was a child there.
And perhaps that is why, when I look at Plaza Simón Bolívar today, I don't just see what it is. I see what it was.
And I also see what it can still be again.
Because some squares should never be lost.
And this one, for those of us who lived it, is one of them.
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