SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, March 7. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The General Directorate of Cultural Heritage of the Government of the Canary Islands promotes a pilot project on the island of La Palma to develop strategies for the prevention, protection and safeguarding of assets that are part of cultural heritage in the face of emergencies, risks and natural disasters.
Through inter-administrative coordination, the Cultural Heritage Recovery Plan aims to develop protocols for action, evacuation, dissemination and cataloging that can be extrapolated to the rest of the Canary Islands.
Nona Perera, general director of Cultural Heritage, held several meetings with the Cabildo de La Palma and the municipalities of El Paso, Los Llanos de Aridane and Tazacorte.
The Minister of Culture and Historical Heritage, Jovita Monterrey, participated in this first meeting, along with part of the technical staff from her area, Isabel Santos; Javier Lozano; George Country; Manuel Cubero and Verónica Ojeda, who will make up the coordination committee together with the professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, Alicia Castillo.
In the following meeting with the Valley councils, Charo González, Councilor for Culture of Los Llanos de Aridane, Juan Miguel Rodríguez, Mayor of Tazacorte and Omar Hernández, Councilor for Heritage of El Paso, joined.
For the general director, this project must be addressed at a regional level with the particularities of each island, since in recent years the need for an action plan in the event of emergencies such as “the fires at the Ateneo de La Laguna in Tenerife and the of Risco Caído in Gran Canaria, the COVID-19 pandemic and finally, in the case of La Palma, the eruption of a volcano, among other crisis situations”.
EMERGENCY PROTOCOL
With this project for the future, a protocol is established for emergencies in case of damage and specific measures aimed at recovery, prioritizing at this time the goods affected by the eruption of the volcano.
In this sense, a prevention and contingency plan is also prepared that is in accordance with the general strategy of Pevolca and other programs that are developed on the island, especially in the Environment, Urban Planning, Tourism and Education.
The proposal consists of working on the basis of complementary strategies and actions within a two-year period, foreseeing a model for updating, monitoring and evaluation, prioritizing urgency and taking advantage of existing information to optimize human and material resources.
Since the start of the volcano eruption in La Palma, the Cultural Heritage areas of both the Government of the Canary Islands and the Island Council have worked together on different projects.
Among them, the preventive removal of assets from the Church of San Nicolás de Bari, the photogrammetry of the cabins in the Barranco de las Ovejas in El Paso by the specialized company Tibicena, a remote sensing and landscape archeology study by Francesc Conesa and also surveys by Nuria Álvarez and Eduardo Díaz in the areas affected by the lava.
Although mainly prevention projects have been carried out in the municipalities affected by the volcanic crisis, this proposal has an insular character and self-protection and evacuation plans are already being developed for the Benahoarita Archaeological Museum (Los Llanos de Aridane) and the Insular Museum of La Palma (Holy Cross of La Palma).
The results of the Plan for the Recovery of the Cultural Heritage of La Palma will be a starting point for the rest of the islands of the archipelago, since it will serve as a work model that can be extrapolated, adapting to the needs and circumstances of each island.
