The Minister of Ecological Transition, Fight against Climate Change and Territorial Planning of the Canary Islands GovernmentJosé Antonio Valbuena, assured this Wednesday at the parliamentary headquarters that without consensus “there will be no Governing Plan for Use and Management (PRUG) of the Teide National Park”.
“There will be no PRUG without an agreement. Our priority is to reach an agreement and the Government is going to guarantee an agreement with all the groups because active listening is our premise in everything we do”, affirmed the council during its intervention in an appearance urged by the Popular Parliamentary Group.
José Antonio Valbuena lamented the “accumulation of lies” that two political parties have generated – alluding to the CC and PP – regarding the PRUG and denied that access to Teide will be prohibited, that visits will be charged, that running is prohibited or that “mammotretos” are going to be built within the National Park.
Valbuena stressed that it is necessary to bet on a consensual regulation, since Teide is among the five most visited National Parks on the planet -it occupies number 3 in the ranking-. “We will continue working to generate a consensus, but some have added extra work to us, which is to dismantle the lies,” she added.
For her part, the popular deputy Luz Reverón stressed that all Canarians “feel Teide as something of ours and we want to protect it because it is part of our culture, our idiosyncrasy and our history.” However, she pointed out that the PRUG “rather than regulate, what it does is prohibit without taking into account Canarian society.”
Luz Reverón indicated that from the Popular Party they are committed to the need to address a regulation that minimizes the impact of human activity on the natural environment of Teide, but “after social dialogue with all the groups and economic activities affected, an issue that the Government of Canary Islands has not taken into account.
THE “GREATEST POSSIBLE CONSENSUS”.
For the Mixed Group, the deputy Ricardo Fernández de la Puente considered that this document must be “enriched” with the contributions of the different groups, for which he asked the counselor to listen to all the sectors involved to reach the “greatest possible consensus” around this document.
The deputy Jesús Ramos Chinea (ASG) valued that the Government of the Canary Islands has “open doors” to dialogue in order to reach a consensus around the PRUG; For this reason, he encouraged José Antonio Valbuena to listen to all the sectors involved, to the other administrations and, without a doubt, to the citizenry.
The spokesman for the Sí Podemos Canarias Group, Manuel Marrero, lamented the “demagoguery” and “populism” that is being generated regarding the PRUG. For this reason, he advocated “calm” and the need to reach an agreement to preserve this natural space in an “adequate, sustainable and fair” manner. He believed that the PRUG draft is a “good starting point” to reach agreements and defended the implementation of measures such as charging a fee for entering the National Park.
The deputy of NC Esther González shared that the new PRUG is a “necessary and essential” document, but considered that the Ministry must try to involve all groups, administrations and all citizens because “it will be the only formula for this plan to be everyone’s document”.
From the nationalist ranks, Rosa Dávila called for the paralysis of the PRUG and for the procedure to start again, seeking agreement with all the groups and “deep” knowledge on the part of Tenerife society about the limitations, prohibitions and uses in the National Park. Rosa Dávila assured that the PRUG is not a document “neither discussed nor agreed” and she blamed the criticism that has arisen around this plan to the fact that, perhaps, it is “very poorly explained.”
Finally, the socialist deputy Nira Fierro accused the Grupo Nacionalista Canario of starring in “the tenth chapter of how to make things up without reading a piece of paper.” For this reason, she urged him to apologize for “the amount of fake news that they have poured into the public.”
Nira Fierro pointed out that, according to the RAE, a draft is a provisional text that can be modified. And, in this sense, she wanted to make it clear that the Government of the Canary Islands has launched an “exemplary” participatory process that will make possible an “adequate” management of the National Park.
