The City Council of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, governed by the Canarian Coalition, the PP and the refugee councilor Evelyn Alonso, has announced this Tuesday that it will appeal the catalog of Francoist vestiges prepared by the Government of the Canary Islands on the understanding that “it does not conform to the law” by mentioning only the municipality, which it describes as “stigmatization of this capital, co-capital of the Canary Islands”.
The study of the ULL on the monument to Franco is blunt: “It does not comply with the Law of Historical Memory”
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The mayor, José Manuel Bermúdez (CC), has made this announcement in a statement in which he indicates that “of course” he will comply with the historical memory law, but rejects “that this city be designated and a different speed applied than in the rest of the Archipelago.
In his opinion, the catalog released this Tuesday breaches the law of historical memory, which stipulates that the competent Ministry will make this list of existing Francoist symbols, streets, monuments and mentions “in the Canary Islands”, which in his opinion It is not fulfilled since “only monuments and enclaves of Santa Cruz de Tenerife are reviewed and it is not a general catalog of all the islands, which is required by the aforementioned law”.
The Government of the Canary Islands is indeed working on a regional catalogue, but that of Tenerife was urgent due to the controversial monument to Franco and because the city had advanced work thanks to a study by the University of La Laguna carried out in 2019 on said specific vestige, which also concluded that it breached the law of historical memory. On the other hand, the Santa Cruz catalog will be part of the entire Canary Islands, since it will be added once it is finished.
However, the mayor understands that the Government of the Canary Islands “points to Santa Cruz de Tenerife” and ignores the Canary Islands Historical Memory Law itself.
“Obviously, we will scrupulously comply with the withdrawal of the Francoist vestiges that are indicated in the catalogue, but we will not act until it complies with the precepts of territoriality required” by law, he affirms.
In his opinion, it is not acceptable that only Santa Cruz de Tenerife appears in that catalog and he wonders if there are not traces of Francoism in the rest of the municipalities of the Canary Islands. The truth is that the rest of the municipalities will appear in the catalog of the Canary Islands, and that Santa Cruz, given the large number of vestiges, has its own document that will complement the regional one.
He argues that the law expressly mentions that the withdrawal procedure will become effective once it is certified by the competent body that the corresponding object or mention of Francoist symbology is incorporated into the catalog which, Bermúdez insists, is from the Canary Islands.
Since 2019, the City Council has had the ULL report that concluded that the monument to Franco in the capital did not comply with the law of historical memory and since then no action has been taken in this regard. On the contrary, this week the PP councilor Guillermo Díaz Guerra proposed to rehabilitate the monument’s fountain to put it back into use.
Catalogue
The document prepared by the Government of the Canary Islands consists of more than 3,000 pages and, according to Patrimony, records in an “exhaustive and rigorous” manner dozens of elements in the capital of the island related to the dictatorship and the civil war. The report must now be approved by the Ministry of Education, Universities, Culture and Sports, after being informed by the Technical Commission of Historical Memory.
Among the vestiges that must be definitively removed from public space are monuments such as the Monument to the Fallen (1947) and the Monument to the Caudillo (1966), sculptures such as the bust of Joaquín Amigó de Lara (1986) or objects such as the propeller of the Crucero Canarias, inscriptions such as the plaques of the National Housing Institute (1957) or the tombstone of the Fallen of Igueste de San Andrés (1975).
As for the denominations found, there are roads such as the General Serrador bridge (1943), Calvo Sotelo street (1936) and Francisco Aguilar y Paz promenade (1994), as well as neighborhoods such as the Victoria neighborhood and square and educational centers. such as the CEIP Fray Albino (1944), among others, while the honors and distinctions include more than 130 people.
