The affirmation Eternal Spring, which many use to coin the Canarian climate, has had a direct impact on the scarce habit of installing heating in buildings. It is true that during the winter months, while the Peninsula records data closer to zero, the Archipelago It enjoys an average of 20 degrees centigrade during central hours.
Although the reality in the middle and high areas of the Islands is quite different. A graphic example of this is the day-to-day life of the students of a School of Early Childhood and Primary Education located in the Tenerife municipality of Icod de los Vinos, who learn to read and write wearing gloves, hats, down jackets and now also a mask.
The teachers of CEIP Llanito Perera -the school in question- have explained to this newspaper what the conditions in which they carry out their work are like and that, with the outbreak of the pandemic, they have worsened. “The temperature in the classroom is usually one degree lower than outside, especially in the one for the little ones, where we have an oil stove, which hardly heats, and two dehumidifiers,” they state, pointing out that the construction of the mentioned class dates from the year 1960. The thermometers usually oscillate first thing in the place between 10 and 11 degrees.
However, the cold is not the only setback that the members of the rural school encounter daily, but also the humidity. “From a single class we can get up to 10 liters of water every morning,” they say. Likewise, protocols and prevention measures against COVID-19 must be added to the panorama, which entail the promotion of air currents in interior spaces by opening doors and windows. And it is that those affected admit that “we spend the day with cold hands and feet.”
Some 10 years ago, when the local council replaced the mosaic floor, “which was very cold”, with another made of wood, the teachers requested underfloor heating, just as other schools in the area had. However, the Consistory refused due to the high cost of installing it.
These days, with the passage of a DANA (isolated depression at high levels) through the northwest of the Canary Islands, which has left cold, rain and snow, the picture of minors sitting at their desks is devastating…
