The natural landscapes of Tenerife have long endured small and serious environmental attacks based on graffiti, illegal camping and motorized routes outside the authorized trails. The surveillance of the protected territory, almost 50% of the total of the Island, is in doubt, due to the scarce presence of forestry agents, even in the very Las Cañadas del Teide National Park.
The latest complaint from Telesforo Bravo Foundation, who bears the name of a naturalist and professor of Petrology and Biochemistry (1913-2002) who did so much for Las Cañadas, his second home, has literally left the national park “at the feet of the horses”, a rating of Jaime Coello, grandson of Telesforo, and director of the foundation created in 2015.
“It has been a long time since the laziness of the Administrations to provide the Teide National Park with the necessary material and personal means, has left it at the feet of the horses. That expression was literal Saturday because on the same day of its declaration as a National Park, a large group of horses climbed the Guajara trail, something expressly prohibited by the Master Plan for Use and Management, due to its erosive effects and dispersion of seeds through feces that can cause. The enormous work carried out for many years in the jewel of the natural spaces of Tenerife, runs the risk of falling on deaf ears. If this continues, the days of the natural values that are protected on Mount Teide are numbered. We demand an immediate reaction from the Cabildo de Tenerife, that those responsible be identified and punished and that the Cabildo and the Government of the Canary Islands once and for all call the places for environmental agents so that surveillance is day and night, every day of the week,” says Coello on Facebook.
But not everyone agrees with him, because Ismael Romen Rodríguez answers him: “Las Cañadas del Teide owes its name to the Cañadas Reales that cross it, ravines that are public, unattachable, imprescriptible. This is how they are defined by the law of Vías Pecuarias and/or Cañadas Reales. Las Cañadas del Teide were formed over thousands of years in a perfect symbiosis between vegetation, animals (thousands of head of cattle) and man, forming a unique space in the world that is much healthier, ecologically speaking, 100 years ago than now. It was nature, man and herbivores who created the wonder that Las Cañadas is today and Las Cañadas are public, unattachable and imprescriptible”.
However, Gloría Pérez Rodríguez, replies that “the term ravine” in the case of Las Cañadas del Teide does not refer to the transhumance passage of cattle, but is a geological term that is applied to “plains that have been formed with the deposit of eroded materials coming from the wall of the caldera and dragged by the water to the depression of this natural amphitheater”, therefore they do not have that category of unattachable or essential”… Although essential for our natural heritage they are.
Grazing in Las Cañadas del Teide was prohibited from the moment the National Park was created (January 22, 1954) as it was an activity incompatible with the primary objective of this legal figure: the conservation of its flora, fauna and gea and all other activities that may take place within it are subordinated to this end. This is how the last goatherds in the area disappeared, such as Juan de Izaña.
