Nine million euros thrown away, literally in the trash. Ten years after the work was finished, the so-called Pilgrim’s Way that was theoretically going to unite Santa Cruz de Tenerife -from Ofra- to Candelaria today is grass for the cat’s tail, without Government of the Canary Islands or Cabildo take responsibility for its maintenance.
A work that the Cabildo never received, then with Joseph Louis Delgado at the head of the Roads area, considering it “badly executed”, like other links in the Añaza and Radazul area, and for which the Government of the Canary Islands -now with Delgado as general director of Road Infrastructures- is not responsible, as “it is not part of the highway and is delivered to the Cabildo”, he affirms, while he does not remember “who decided to make that road, but I have heard that it was an environmental imposition when the Environmental Impact Statement was processed”.
Specifically, the trail was built between 2010 and 2012 to facilitate the pilgrimage to Villa Mariana, within the project for environmental improvements to the South highway and within a budget of 24.5 million pesetas outside the projected budget for the expansion of the three lanes of TF-1 from Santa Cruz to Güímar. The idea then was the environmental recovery of the area surrounding the motorway, but what has been achieved has been quite the opposite, not to mention the chaos caused between Tabaiba and Añaza by runoff, without provision for drainage and with links that forgot about bus stops and from their respective sidewalks to travel safely next to the highway. The pedestrian path, properly speaking, is today five kilometers long, from Añaza to Candelaria, because the urban sections from the Hospital Nuestra Señora de Candelaria to Añaza cannot be considered such.
The Pilgrim’s Way is initially 2.5 meters wide and is protected in some sections with metal screens or railings, with a 62-meter metal bridge that crosses the La Higuera ravine and a 1.2-kilometer pavement to sections in ditches on the edge of the highway, until returning to a wide walk from Varadero to the Círculo de Amistad, in Barranco Hondo. From there, a path barely 1.5 meters wide goes up to Las Caletillas on wooden sleepers supported by metal railings. A section of about 500 meters considered unsafe and that since 2013 the Cabildo closes in the days before the great pilgrimages to Candelaria (February 2 and August 15). “The road over Bajo la Cuesta is not safe, because the evacuation is very complicated,” he acknowledges. Thomas Felix Garcia, insular director of Highways, who insists that the Cabildo “neither can nor wants to maintain that Camino del Peregrino, among other reasons because it was not received as it is not a work linked to the highway.” In any case, he points out that the solution happens because “the Government of the Canary Islands and the municipalities where it runs agree.”
In this aspect, Mari Brito, mayor of Candelaria, affirms that “it is the eternal discussion or debate between the Government of the Canary Islands and the Cabildo, I no longer know what to call it. I have spoken with some and with others, since the previous mandate, and they tell me from the Cabildo that it is not in the inventory, because the road was not received at the time, but even if it is not in the inventory it does not mean that it is not yours . And José Luis Delgado, when I asked him, told me that according to the decree on transfers between the Government of the Canary Islands and the Cabildo, everything that is within a series of meters in the highway easement falls under the responsibility of road maintenance, which Therefore, it is the responsibility of the Cabildo. The only thing we have done, when we have staff, is to clean it of cat tails and weeds, because we know that sporadically people go there to walk, but we close it during the holidays, for security, because we do not know how many people it could hold . In short, we only clean it when we can, but we cannot do other types of maintenance, because it is not our responsibility”. And he gives the example of the unfinished bridge of Brillasol. “When we wanted to act in it, we were told by the Government that we could not touch that bridge.”
