If autodidacticism had a name, that would undoubtedly be that of Isidro Felipe Acosta. Chronicler, photographer, creator, tireless traveler, lover of ornithology and traditions, defender of his town and many other things, among which he has been the first press officer of the Los Realejos City Council.
But above all things, he was the person who got the municipality to have a voice in the media at a time when Puerto de la Cruz was the center of information as the first tourist city in the Canary Islands.
His relationship with the world of communication and the press in particular was by chance. Isidro finished his studies at a very young age – he reached the sixth grade – because his father died and both he and his brother had to go out to work to support the family.
At the height of the tourist boom, both dedicated themselves to the hospitality industry, in his specific case as a cook, an activity whose schedules were incompatible with his studies.
His curious spirit led him to found, together with a group of friends, the ornithological movement Halcón Tagarote, which he was president of, and to organize some campaigns to protect birds. In 1985 he alone began the work to declare Rambla de Castro a Protected Area. He started working at three in the afternoon, so he dedicated his mornings to looking for information in the library of the University of La Laguna. Years later, he got it.
That fact marked a before and after in his professional life because it was his first contact with the world of communication, to which after almost forty years, 33 of them in the City Council, he says goodbye because he is retiring.
At the beginning of the 1990s, Los Realejos was a municipality that was advancing more and more, with a political, social and cultural activity that did not stop growing but nevertheless it did not appear in the media and there was no press office as it is known in the nor a person destined to promote the municipality. For this reason, he presented a project to the then mayor José Vicente González Hernández to write a quarterly municipal newsletter that later received the name La voz de Los Realejos.
The first issue came out in March of that same year and curiously, it was printed in the DIARIO DE AVISOS workshops, on Salamanca street. 8,000 copies were published that he himself distributed in two days. In addition, he sought publicity and charged for it. “There were editions that were almost free for the City Council due to the number of ads there were,” he recalls.
The success of his work led to his time at the now-defunct newspaper La Gaceta de Canarias as a correspondent for Los Realejos. At the same time that he was meeting with his manager, there was an explosion in the Santa Bárbara pyrotechnics workshops, an event that left the death of a 47-year-old woman and the first chronicle of her.
He spent two months reporting on three topics that were “rabidly topical” at that time: fireworks and their possible effects on the May Festival; aluminosis in three groups of social housing in La Montaña, La Cruz Santa and San Agustín; and the nightmare of the Los Campeches arsonist.
In June of that same year, the mayor proposed that he take charge of the City Council press office as trusted personnel starting from scratch in every way because he only had a typewriter, there was not a single photograph and the archive was a goal. to reach.
Those were times when you had to wait a day to develop the photo rolls because the laboratory was in Santa Úrsula, which were sent by bus along with the press releases to the Puerto de la Cruz station, where the correspondents picked them up.
His work did not end there but was a kind of “fire extinguisher”. He worked as a tourism technician because he made guides and promotional posters and attended the international tourism fair (Fitur) and after the creation of Radio Realejos, in May 1991, he was its coordinator.
In 1990 he created the Outstanding Realejeros Award, wrote the bases and was secretary of the jury on numerous occasions. In addition, he continued with the distribution of the newsletter.
Three years later he took out the position of Information Relations Manager, with functions of Press Officer, being the first city council in Spain to create this position in the list of jobs that has always been and continues to be trusted.
However, he can boast of having worked with mayors from all political parties who always respected his job despite the fact that they could have assigned him to another department of the City Council because he always remained “apolitical.”
When he stopped being press officer, from 2003 until the Tuesday that he said goodbye to his colleagues, he took care of other functions, such as layout, photography, posters, brochures and tourist guides. This was required by the position for which he applied, which required a person who could perform different functions within the cabinet, a kind of “firefighter”, he jokes.
Isidro Felipe has seen the evolution of a municipality that has changed “radically” regarding the quality of services, infrastructure, social, sports and recreational facilities, as a consequence of a “tremendous” development, “but the people remain the same and celebrating 80 parties”, he points out.
In these 33 years in the Consistory he has gathered hundreds of anecdotes, but he especially remembers one: when he came to ask for the resignation in public and through an official letter from his own Town Planning councilor as president of the ornithological movement. “I was lucky that they were people with an incredible spirit, although I couldn’t stop them from getting angry,” he admits.
If he is proud of something, it is the creation and implementation of the Historical Photography Archive, which is currently one of the first in the Canary Islands in its modality with more than 15,000 photographs ranging from the end of the 19th century to the 1960s. xx.
To this digitized material is added a volume of 25,090 photographs in paper format made between 1990 and the year 2000, of the activities generated in that period of time.
He has two books pending, one almost finished on tourism in the municipality, and another on treasures and wonders of the North of Tenerife. This last project is clear to him, but he has to seek financing. He will not lack time to do it and neither will people who trust his work.
He has succeeded so far because he has shown signs of being a professional who received cum laude at the university of life.
On his last day of work, Isidro Felipe Acosta did not want to be fired, but he could not avoid it either. As he left the Town Hall, the staff from the different offices began to applaud to the point that he forgot to clock in. He, with a smile and a touch of humor, limited himself to saying: “Work very hard, you have to pay a retiree more.”
