Martín is a veteran and slightly dyslexic apologist for the port of Fonsalía, an infrastructure that the Canary Islands Coalition and the Popular Party have always defended and that also supports and promotes the regional government, but less: Podemos does not want to hear about the project and Nueva Canarias does just a few days ago he expressed his resolute opposition to it. Both for some and for others the port of Fonsalía is a crazy and unjustifiable ecological attack, but it seems unlikely to me that Román Rodríguez and Noemí Santana will abandon their respective armchairs in solidarity with the whales and dolphins. In any case, what is urgent is an intelligent, plural and orderly debate on the costs and benefits of a new port that, supposedly, will boost the transport of people and goods between Tenerife, La Gomera and La Palma. The proponents of the project – those 200 million pre-budgeted seem insufficient to most engineers who can be consulted – should recognize the negative ecological and environmental impact, which has already been warned by marine biologists from the University of La Laguna without the parties and business organizations in favor of the port raise an eyebrow or shake the argument. That in the first Canarian government chaired by a socialist since 1993, a Ministry of Ecological Transition and the Fight against Climate Change is created to end up declaring the port of Fonsalía as “a priority” seems a joke by José Antonio Valbuena himself, who is the councilor most gifted to make a career at El Club de la Comedia. Valbuena is enslaved in Parliament as if she were Petra Kelly and staged the stoppage of the works of a hotel in La Tejita that he did not fault when he was councilor of the Cabildo de Tenerife, but he does not release a complaint about Fonsalía. All very crazy. Or very cynical. Very shameless and dark and, at the same time, bleakly light.
The arguments that revolve around the Fonsalía project, especially those favorable to the new port, contain more ideological moths than viable sustainable development strategies. They come from a time before the 2008 crisis and before the covid era and its bankruptcies, tears and teachings. To claim that an inland traffic port will automatically (and regardless of the environmental price) become a formidable pole of economic development for the southwest of Tenerife is nothing short of reckless. There are other substitute options that are more conservationist, prudent and respectful of the fragility of our ecosystems – which will withstand harsh attacks by global warming in the coming decades – than building a new port. The debate on the port of Fonsalía – we need it in Parliament, in the University, in professional associations, in the media – must demand more creative imagination, more solidarity and collaboration between administrations, more options for micro economy and projects. cluster, a general and plausible development framework for Tenerife.
