The masks are the only thing that keeps reminding us that two years have passed in which a pandemic turned our lives upside down. A wave of death and despair like the one that hit Santa Cruz de Tenerife back in 1893, when the morbid cholera hit hard a port city that could not abstract from a disease that spread almost unchecked, causing the death of 382 people . Then, the faith and devotion of the chicharreros for their Lord of Tribulations worked the miracle, the disease began to be controlled and disappeared after the procession of the image in prayers through the streets of the city. The people, grateful, promised that every Holy Tuesday, they would recognize the miraculous image of its intercession for the chicharreros, and, since then, the Lord of Tribulations processions through the streets of El Toscal. The COVID pandemic prevented that promise from being fulfilled during these two years, although the faithful went to the church of San Francisco de Asís, both in 2020 and 2021, to accompany him, but also to ask for his protection in this new attack to health, this time worldwide.
Yesterday the chicharreros returned to clothe their Lord of Tribulations, they did it forcefully, with hundreds of people waiting for him in the street, but also filling the temple in which the bishop, Bernardo Álvarez, presided over the mass prior to the procession , and in which the municipal delegation was led by the mayor, José Manuel Bermúdez.
The Toscaleros, eager to receive and recognize their protector, resumed the tradition of flower carpets, which honored the image (also with showers of petals from the balconies) on the street that bears his name since 1894 (before it was the street of the East) and that was changed in recognition of the miracle that was supposed to stop the epidemic. It was on that street, as the chronicler of Santa Cruz, José Manuel Ledesma, tells us, that the epidemic in El Toscal hit the hardest, with the death of almost all its neighbors, which is why the parish priest of the church of San Francisco at that time, Santiago Beyro, asked the City Council that the street be renamed Señor de las Tribulaciones.
The chronicler recalls that, precisely, the exceptional behavior of the chicharrera population during this epidemic served so that on April 23, 1894, the Council of Ministers granted Santa Cruz the title of Very Beneficial. In 2011, the City Council approved giving the Lord of Tribulations the official title of Lord of Santa Cruz.
