The Municipality of La Laguna he will demand from the Church the restitution of the goods that he appropriated in the municipality. The mayor, Luis Yeray Gutiérrez (PSOE), indicated yesterday that the Governing Board addressed a proposal to take the matter to the plenary session and proceed to «the reversal of those registrations that they themselves recognize that they are not in accordance with the law. In addition, he stated that the objective of the plenary initiative is that all the political formations that want to join the demand for the restitution of these properties to their owners.
Headquarters of the Bishopric of Tenerife and with a historic center that maintains a close link with religious traditions, La Laguna is the most affected municipality in the Archipelago due to property registrations by the Church of which it has not been possible to confirm that they were correctly carried out . This follows from the report on the application of the Mortgage Law, which became known on Monday and in which the Spanish Episcopal Conference explains that it has reviewed the ownership of 532 assets in the Islands, of which it has been able to verify the proper registration of 412, while there are 17 duplicate files and 32 in which information is missing to accurately identify them. Practically all of these cases are in the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife and among them there are 15 in the municipality of La Laguna.
ANDhe first deputy mayor of La Laguna and leader of the left-wing coalition United You Can, Rubens AscaniOr, he expressed yesterday that from this political formation and from the local government they have taken steps to make it possible to recover the assets incorrectly registered by the Catholic Church. One of the main actions took place on February 17 last year, when he addressed a letter to the mayor requesting “as soon as possible” the preparation of a report by the municipal legal services on the authority of the City Council to carry out “inquiries” and “challenges” before the “registration of possible public goods by the Catholic Church”.
In this sense, the Bishopric of Tenerife expressed yesterday that “the Church has no interest in appropriating what is not its own». And he added along the same lines: «The incidents detected by the report published by the Spanish Episcopal Conference, referring to 32 cases in the Diocese, They refer to real estate for which it was not possible to fully verify whether there were previous titles that provided guarantees on the property. Even so, we remain willing to carry out any verification ».
In other Tenerife municipalities such as The Realejos, the spokesman for the municipal government group, Adolfo González, pointed out that “we have not detected any property that is part of the municipal heritage that is affected by this situation, so in Los Realejos we do not have any conflict with the Church regarding unregistered property and We are also not aware of any conflict with local residents.
For its part, in San Juan de la Rambla its mayor, Ezequiel Domínguez, indicated that “this matter is limited to the two main churches, that of San José and that of the San Juan hull, so, obviously, the ownership of these two temples is not under discussion nor do we have discrepancies or debates. No neighbor has sent us either that there are more complaints.
