“A historic center can, perhaps, be a museum but never a mausoleum and unfortunately in La Orotava there are 641 buildings classified as assets of heritage interest and half of them are empty and uninhabited “because the majority of the institutions that occupy and “They care about maintaining that heritage from before, they do not stop putting impediments to absolutely logical things,” said yesterday the director of the International Center for Heritage Conservation (Cicop), Francisco Aznar.
Aznar made these statements during the inauguration of the seminar ‘La Orotava Open Patio and Landscape, innovation and conservation in historic centers’, organized by the Association of Houses with History of the Town, with the collaboration of the City Council and the CICOP Foundation, and which ends today.
In this framework, he stressed that “heritage has to be alive and adapt to work and circumstances,” a statement with which the rest of the speakers also agreed; the mayor, Francisco Linares; the general director of Heritage of the Government of the Canary Islands, Miguel Ángel Clavijo; and the director of Historical Heritage, Territorial Planning and Landscape Cabildo de Tenerife, Isabel de Esteban.
It was the latter who, along these lines, added that “architectural heritage is not static and must adapt to the times and uses, conserving, of course, the elements that guarantee its safeguard.”
In this sense, he stressed that La Orotava has one of the best preserved historic centers in the Canary Islands and is an example of the challenge of combining heritage, landscape and tourism.
Finally, he pointed out that this seminar “is an important step in understanding the challenges faced by public administrations and society in general when it comes to safeguarding heritage values, whether movable, immovable or intangible.”
For his part, Miguel Ángel Clavijo assured that having a group of owners who already have problems for their heirs to move to La Orotava “says a lot about how badly we have been doing it from the administration and the instruments with which we “Public managers work to make public heritage habitable and conserve, in this case, in La Orotava.”
However, he hoped that “formulas can be found so that the helmets do not die of boredom”, as has happened in other places, and cited the examples of Granada and La Coruña, and hoped that the conclusions of the seminar “are not full of romanticism but that they are effective to better deal with an extremely serious problem.”
The last to speak was Francisco Linares. “I am mayor of a municipality of 210 square kilometers and a well-kept but empty historic center, because there are almost no people.”
He indicated that maintaining the town center “is expensive and entails a series of resources and conversions, and we must look for complementary economic income so that the roofs do not fall.”
Just like Clavijo, he highlighted that there are historic centers “that are being converted from prudence and balance, because if that does not happen these mansions will not be able to continue being maintained” and he committed as a deputy to taking an initiative if necessary. “Nothing is set in stone for life,” he stated.
