SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, June 25. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The Roque de Los Muchachos Visitor Center celebrated six months last Thursday and during this time it has received a total of 14,839 people, the majority being Canarian residents.
These numbers reflect that more and more visitors are flocking to the highest point on the island of La Palma to discover an infrastructure that values the palm sky and the scientific work of the Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory.
“The indicators confirm that our bet was a success,” said the president of the Cabildo, Mariano Zapata. “In just half a year, the Visitor Center has received almost 15,000 tourists who used to go up to Roque de Los Muchachos and couldn’t even buy a bottle of water or receive information about astrophysicists or the importance of the La Palma sky.”
“For this reason, it is time to value the efforts of this Government Group to finally move forward with an infrastructure that has been historically claimed, and to do so, moreover, during the volcanic emergency,” added Zapata.
MAY, A RECORD MONTH
The report on the activity of the Roque de Los Muchachos Visitor Center reflects a progressive increase in the number of visits, which have been rising almost month after month.
The Center was inaugurated on December 19, receiving 653 people in less than two weeks. In January, a total of 1,463 visitors attended; in February, 1,299; in March there were 2,127; in April they increased to 3,454; in May he scored his historical record, with 4,265 visits in a single month; while in the first half of June 1,578 people have passed through the place.
The activity document of the Center also details the origin of the visitors. The vast majority, 6,385, are from the Canary Islands. They are followed by peninsular tourists, who add up to a total of 4,170 in this first semester of activity. Third place is occupied by German visitors, with 696. However, it is also noteworthy that the Center has received people from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Italy, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Portugal, Russia and Poland.
A TECHNOLOGICAL REFERENCE
In view of the number of visitors received as well as their origin, the Councilor for Tourism of the Cabildo, Raúl Camacho, has valued the work that the public company Sodepal has done to collect and monitor the activity of the center.
“Collecting all this information allows us to make better decisions when managing the Visitor Center and tourism planning in La Palma,” Camacho pointed out.
This data collection process is due in part to the building’s technological equipment. The Visitor Center, which went ahead with an investment of 6 million euros from the Canary Islands Development Fund (Fdcan), not only stands out for its aesthetics, perfectly integrated with the landscape of the place. Also for its technological infrastructure.
One of the attractions of the Visitor Center is that visitors can put themselves in the shoes of astrophysicists, doing experiments, looking at the stars like a true professional or discovering the secrets of space in one of the rooms of the place.
The building has three places for exhibitions. The first of them, called ‘Canaries, a window to the universe’, explains the unique conditions offered by the Archipelago, and especially La Palma and Roque de los Muchachos, for astronomical observation.
The second, called ‘Exploring the Universe’, shows, in a synthetic way, the current state of knowledge that we have about the Universe. And the third, called ‘Back to Earth’, highlights the natural setting in which the Observatory is located, at an altitude of 2,400 meters and with unbeatable conditions for observing the sky.
“If one thing is clear, it is that the Roque de Los Muchachos Visitor Center is a reference infrastructure in the Canary Islands, the Peninsula and abroad. A brave bet by the Government Group of this Cabildo to continue promoting tourism and turning it into a lever necessary for the recovery of La Palma”, declared the president of the Cabildo.
