The City Council of Santa Cruz de Tenerife will debate in plenary session next Friday whether the Municipal Corporation initiates the necessary file to send the candidacy to UNESCO so that the city’s Carnival is recognized as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
The spokeswoman for Ciudadanos (Cs), Matilde Zambudio, is the one who has made this proposal. In her opinion, “because of tradition, singularity and spectacularity, Carnival should be recognized with this distinction, which will also contribute to a greater awareness of its importance.” “Our party is at the height of other carnivals in the world that already have this recognition,” she added.
The proposal presented also urges that the municipal government work with the University of La Laguna (ULL) and the Carnival groups in the maintenance, protection, conservation and historical dissemination of the Santa Cruz Carnival as intangible heritage. In this way, the work carried out in 2019 within the conferences on the Intangible Heritage of Santa Cruz by the Autonomous Organization of Culture and the academic institution would continue with the help of different academics, professionals and researchers, explains Zambudio.
In these days it was revealed that the history of the Carnival of Santa Cruz is not protected or collected in any place or unitary support, they are losing much of the knowledge, scripts, photos, etc., just as it was highlighted that the function of the Casa del Carnaval, managed by the Development Society, is dedicated mostly to tourists and should be the center where that diverse archive that makes up the history of Carnival is collected, he defends.
In this regard, Matilde Zambudio states that although it is essential that they allocate means to organize the Carnival each year, it is equally essential to work to protect it from a historical, social, and cultural perspective, through the development of a unitary project dedicated to study and creation of a general inventory on the compilation of information, distinctive elements, photographs, costumes, material, stories, artistic creations of various kinds, both from an academic point of view and as intangible heritage of the Canary Islands. “Right now, it’s really what we should be prioritizing when talking about the importance of Carnival,” she explains.
“The Carnival of Santa Cruz de Tenerife has a great story behind it, from its origins to the present, a story that is lost every day if we don’t remedy it, if we don’t really value the importance and influence it has had for the municipality in the past, present and future, its conservation, protection and dissemination as Intangible Heritage of the Canary Islands being inalienable for the chicharreros”, he concludes.
