The well-known Snowman located in the roundabout of Los Majuelos avenue, on the border between Santa Cruz and La Laguna, has been chosen by thousands of people on at least four occasions as the worst monument located in one of the 23,000 roundabouts throughout Spain.
However, now a group of citizens is mobilizing to achieve the opposite: to be recognized as one of the most appreciated in the national territory and an outstanding piece of the movement that some have come to call “roundabout”.
The ironic term refers to “an artistic movement consisting of crowning roundabouts with hideous monuments”, indicated one of the surveys.
Roundabout arose in Murcia and has spread “like a plague” through the thousands of spaces of this type that exist in Spain, it was concluded in another of the surveys.
In practically all the occasions in which the opinion of the citizens has been sought to choose the ugliest and most hated monuments, the Snowman has always occupied the top positions.
In 2013 the digital Información.com and Libertad Digital and years later motorpasion.com, La Sexta and Cadena Ser carried out massive votes and in all of them it was chosen as one of the greatest monumental horrors in all of Spain.
In the first media it was ranked number five and second in eighth. In the Libertad Digital ranking, the sculpture from Tenerife received almost 2,000 votes and was the subject of all kinds of derogatory comments in the style of: “Monument to Christmas, that’s how they spend our money.”
The peninsular voters were struck by the fact that on an island that stands out for its good weather, a tribute to snow is being paid.
The comments of the participants in the voting pointed out, for example: “for some small children to have done it, it is not bad”, “seeing this, it does not surprise me that it does not snow in the Canary Islands”, “I live nearby and I can’t stop thinking who is This happened to him”, “the best thing is the auction of the saucepan”, “it looks like the Spanish Mr. Bean did it”, “I think it is incredible and disrespectful to pay for this” or “to jail with the author”.
Even a reader agrees with a graffiti that appeared years ago on the doll itself asking for it to be knocked down. The truth is that whether you like it or not, this piece has ended up giving its name to the entire neighborhood that is located around it.
Despite the derogatory comments, the author is the renowned Czech artist Jirí Georg Dokoupil, whose proposals achieved great success during the 1980s.
This creator had his first contact with the island when the Santa Cruz de Tenerife City Council commissioned him to design the 1987 Carnival poster.
From then on, he was also chosen to make this sculpture, which from the beginning has been surrounded by controversy.
First, because the residents criticized its enormous cost and dubious aesthetics, and secondly, because the Autonomous Organism for Culture (OAC) of Santa Cruz has refused on several occasions to maintain and clean it, considering that it is not their property.
In the Canary Islands, other pieces have not fared well either, such as those located on the route between Agaete and the capital of Gran Canaria, those of Maspalomas or some of Fuerteventura.
The proliferation of roundabouts with their consequent sculpture throughout the national territory is not accidental.
The origin is the law approved at the beginning of the times of democracy that established “the obligation to allocate in public works contracts an item of at least 1% to works of conservation or enrichment of the Spanish Historical Heritage or to the promotion of the artistic creativity, preferably in the work itself or in its immediate environment”.
Despite the good intentions of this legislation, the truth is that the result has not always been to the taste of citizens.
The problem arose because to qualify for the benefits of this 1%, the work had to exceed 601,000 euros and not affect the security and defense of the State.
For this reason they have proliferated in large public works, newly built industrial estates, urban expansion plans and the like, giving rise to what has been sarcastically defined as “roundabout”.
