His wife Loli, his two children (Johnny and Leo), his two granddaughters (Selene and Idoya), his sons and political grandchildren and his neighbors consider him the “joy of the garden”, the beacon that lights up with happiness a small family that lives in the vicinity of Romano Street, in Barranco Hondo, where Blas Donate Sánchez, aged 91, continues to look after 10,000 square meters of farm with hope. One day and another, despite the prostheses he has on both hips and knees. No one would say it by seeing him walk, slowly but firmly, through the furrows that he has carved out with so much care.
The history of Blas Donate is the history of many canaries of his generation. He was born in Granadilla de Abona in 1930 and there he spent his “first youth”, as he puts it, helping the family “scratching the rows of tomato plants” in a “time of great scarcity”. After serving in the military in the 49th Infantry, convinced by La Palma soldiers, he decided to embark on the Santa María towards Venezuela, “around 1953 more or less,” he tells us, showing that at his age his memory is already beginning to waver. Then emigration was already legalized.
He arrived in Caracas after “15 days of hard journey” after paying “about 6,000 pesetas, I don’t remember very well,” where a brother who had already died was waiting for him. “I started working in a bar belonging to an acquaintance in Granadilla and then I started one on my own, until I went to work with an uncle of mine, Venancio, bringing and taking sand from San Felipe to Puerto Cabello, making three trips a day with a gandola of 14 meters. They worked hard there, even the Venezuelans. ” Blas Donate made money, but put it in a bank in the account of another and “I could not send dogs to the family.”
Convinced by his brother-in-law, he decided to marry by proxy, something then the order of the day, when he already had two children with another woman. “He told me that the wife had a sister in Granadilla named Lolita, she showed me the photo and I liked it. I wrote to him and we got married by proxy. Three months later he arrived in La Guaira by plane and we began to live in Maracay on weekends, while I continued working in Puerto Cabello five days a week ”.
Juan Antonio (Johhny) and Leo were born there in Venezuela, but Loli, his wife, did not like living there. She ended up convincing her husband to return to the Canary Islands and in 1972 they made the return trip together. He began to work in the Atlántico distribution company until, already retired, he decided to exploit the orchards that his wife inherited in Barranco Hondo, about 10,000 square meters (a football field) distributed in small terraces very close to the urban area of that candelariero neighborhood. Although he lives a little further away from the farm, in a three-story house that was built after arriving from Venezuela.
He is so enthusiastic about working in the fields that he has tried to enlarge it, but “they ask me a lot of money for a piece of land that is rustic and where they have no entrance for a beast to enter, more than 5 euros per square meter, when it is not worth more than 3 , 50 ”, he affirms while holding his inseparable bag with his hand. “I plant potatoes, sweet potatoes, lettuce, peppers … Everything is given here, as long as you do it with love,” he says proudly, while inviting us to savor a delicious mandarin, one of the many fruit trees that he also has in one of the orchards, near the home of his daughter Leo, who has tried unsuccessfully to make her father act as a royal retiree. “One day he told the doctor to forbid me to go to the farm and he replied that this was the best medicine so that it would last longer, that if they took my job I would die faster,” Blas remarking that “my wife always He says not to come, but if they take away the field I will die, I am entertained by working, I am not from sitting watching TV, I always like to be fixing something ”. Although he underwent surgery on the hips and knees, where he wears a prosthesis, he considers that he has not had “any disease, just nonsense”, taking care of his tension with “some little pill”, although he clarifies that “the heart is like clockwork”.
Blas Donate Sánchez receives a salary of 1,000 euros as a retiree. “It seems little to me,” he says, and he sows and collects for the family more than for doing business, because, among other reasons, he knows that “the field is for the peasants and the family does not like that. Today the youth is in other things and thus there is so much abandoned field ”.
He looks lean, but it won’t be because he doesn’t eat. “I love to drink half a liter of milk in the morning, that canned one, with gofio, Cola-Cao, some cookies and when they bring me I eat some churros. At noon, if there is any, he will send me up to two plates of lentils, followed by a tangerine or an orange. In the afternoon I have an omelette in a pan and at night, around eight o’clock, I already have dinner, again half a liter of milk with coffee and some cookies, although today I did not have cookies, “he says, looking at his daughter and a of his granddaughters.
