The Department of Rural Development has published 1,500 copies on paper of the guide The cereal culture in Los Realejos, a document that aims to signify the ancestral work of cultivating, harvesting, harvesting and transforming this basic food in a municipality that produces more than 50% of the cereal that is collected throughout the Island. It will be distributed in libraries of the municipality of Los Realejos and It will also be available soon for consultation in digital format through the municipal website www.losrealejos.es. Likewise, these guides will be distributed as a complement to the celebration of didactic units with local schoolchildren related to the agricultural sector, as well as in events to stimulate the same subject.
The accidental mayor of Los Realejos, Noelia González, accompanied the Councilor for Rural Development, Alexis Hernández, in the presentation of this guide at the City Hall, an act in which the Cultania technique (Comprehensive Management of Culture and Historical Heritage) and editor of the guide, Yaiza González Hernández. The mayor, Manuel Domínguez, entitled his speech “When the land is tinged with gold”, in allusion to the color that the royal fields take, “especially in the nucleus of Icod el Alto, by something known as Icod de los Trigos, each summer prepared for the harvest and the harvest ».
«There are dozens of families in this municipality who still Their first and only economic source is the production, collection or transformation of cereal, ancestral primary tasks that with more or less machinery have survived the passage of time, something to which we also intend to contribute the dissemination with this guide, a way of teaching, explaining and exemplifying to value a crop that has defined part of our history ”, assured Domínguez.
For her part, Noelia González highlighted that “Los Realejos is golden for many factors, especially in summer because of that aspect that our farmlands take on, but also because of the deep-rooted essence of its people, because of those people who treat them with care and care. traditions, a fact to which agricultural dedication is not alien, people who continue to put their efforts in the primary sector with all the difficulties, which they sow, in the broad sense of the word, to continue collecting and putting this municipality where it deserves, a municipality of gold ».
«Gold medal also deserves this guide, a whole exercise in dumping all the historical, documentary information, straddling the anecdotal and the scientific, very graphic in resources, it will serve present and future generations to rediscover that royal agricultural past, understand it better and put it in value to respect it and inherit it knowingly, “added Noelia González.
The idiosyncrasy of cereal
Alexis Hernández stressed that the cereal in Los Realejos «has defined a own culture and idiosyncrasy and differential within the primary sector that we have understood necessary to collect in a documentary work, our wish is that this didactic guide recognizes this work and disseminates it among the citizens of this municipality and outside it ». He added that through actions such as close and direct collaboration with the local agricultural sector and the Tenerife Cereal Association (Acete), the organization of the Wheat Festival, the Traditional Harvest and other energizing meetings around cereal, a product that is also with the seal of quality gastronomy of Los Realejos, «a common conviction has been fostered to relaunch this ancestral crop, contributing to the recovery of the agricultural landscape and the birdlife associated with it, recovering land that was not in agricultural use and turning it back into a professional outlet in the field for the youth and a constant tribute to those who historically worked our lands ».
