The Archive of La Orotava requests citizen collaboration to preserve local history

«we are not eternal. All people die, but this file will remain for future generations. We have to guarantee the memory of our municipality”, stressed the mayor during the presentation of the annual balance of the villero file. «I am sure that more than 80% of our memory as a municipality is still in private homes. We live in a town that respects its history and I know that there are private collections that keep very important documents and photographsof historical moments of the Villa, which would be ideal if they were shared with this archive so that the story can also reach future generations,” Linares remarked.

In 2022, AMLO received 14 donations from individuals, a figure that every year “goes higher”. Recently, an individual donated the records of the closure of the old casino in the town, where the municipal library is currently located, “and that has allowed us to recover a part of our past,” said the mayor. From the archive it is highlighted that it is not necessary to get rid of the documents that you want to assign, it would be enough to only allow its copy to avoid a definitive disappearance.

The councilor responsible for AMLO, Delia Escobarrecalled that this entity preserves documents from the 15th century, although most of them are from the period between the 19th century and the present, since a fire destroyed the old archive on June 2, 1841. In addition, for two years it has become in the only archive in the Canary Islands that has opened a section of sound documents“oral testimonies that more and more researchers from the islands are donating to us,” Escobar explained.

This archive is also a place for consultation and research, which in 2022 received 699 requests for information. 68% corresponding to administrative issues and 32% of a historical nature. The four AMLO workers also collaborate with visits from schoolchildren and individuals, as well as in the creation of exhibitions that serve to disseminate part of their collection. Last year two were organized: one dedicated to education in La Orotava and another for the municipality at festivals. The entity is present in social networks as Facebook and Youtube and went the first archive of the Canary Islands that had an informative blog on the internet. In its facilities there is also a small museum with elements that over the last decades have facilitated the work of archivists, such as typewriters or cameras.

The project to create a new headquarters of the Municipal Archive of La Orotava in the solar of ancient atlantean theater It is already on the table of the Town Hall, which hopes that it will become in the future “a great classroom for historical research”, capable of gathering most of the more than five centuries of history of La Orotava.