At the age of 84, a devastating illness has taken Víctor Pérez Barrios, a much-loved neighbor in the municipality of Guía de Isora who dedicated his entire life to the countryside. Family and friends mourn the loss of a person who earned the affection of those who knew him. “A good man has left, an exceptional person”, was the most repeated comment yesterday among those who came to say their last goodbyes to the Santa Lastenia funeral home, in the capital of Tenerife.
Víctor Pérez Barrios was part of the first corporation of the Guía de Isora City Council in the open democratic stage after the death of Francisco Franco. He was one of the councilors of a historic government group led by Mayor Pedro Reyes, from the Unión de Centro Democrático, who obtained an absolute majority in April 1979.
But his great passion was not politics, but the field. And so he made it clear in a report published by DIARIO DE AVISOS in October 2016, in which he reviewed a life full of sacrifices and devoted body and soul to agriculture since the late 1950s, after returning from Venezuela with his father, like so many other canaries, and start working in the tomato plantations.
They were very hard years in which the land was practically unproductive and the water, almost a utopia in the region, which forced the farmers to bring soil from the north of the Island, build sewers, build tanks and carve furrows with camels and mules. . Víctor confessed in the report titled A life among banana trees that “when things got ugly with the tomato”, as it did not compensate for the effort it required or the fight against devastating pests, he gave himself fully to the cultivation of bananas. His farm, located in Pedro Afonso, on the Isoran coast, with spectacular views of La Gomera, once had 35,000 square meters and more than 6,000 banana trees, but in 2006 it suffered a setback: the expropriation of 13,000 meters to build the Fonsalía desalination plant. He suddenly lost more than 2,500 banana trees.
He recognized in the dialogue held with the Dean of the press that the field is not currently an option for the future for the new generations. “Young people don’t want to get involved in agriculture, this is very sacrificed, I myself would advise my grandchildren not to do it,” he commented, while returning a question when we asked him about the future of the most exported Canarian fruit: “And what about who knows the future that each one has here?”, a reflection that he accompanied with a warning about the “excessive” economic dependence on tourism: “They are putting everything on the grill and, be careful, that is not good.”
TEMPORARY
Víctor Pérez Barrios boasted of Guía de Isora and its climate, “the best in Tenerife”, although his prodigious memory did not forget the “prince’s winds”, a storm that in 1973 left a deep wound in the region after devastating the crops later to tear down the walls that protected it. “That was horrible, not a plantation was left standing, almost half a century has passed but I remember it as if it were today.”
You could talk about everything with him. In the report he also spoke about the open debate, at that time involved in a great controversy, about the possible construction of the port of Fonsalía, close to his farm, and he did not hide his skepticism: “My eyes will not see it, there are many years of hearing about the same thing.
After more than six decades dealing with Mother Nature, Víctor was convinced that “plants think”, a statement that he accompanied by pointing out the vines that climbed up one of the fences on his farm.
I looked at them and said: “Look at them, do you see how they think?” It was just one example of the sensitivity displayed by a country sage.
