The fires, the May festivities, Holy Week, an athlete surfing on the beach of El Socorro, the Castro mansion, the church of Santiago Apóstol, the cereal culture, are the reasons that illustrate the 2024 calendar that it publishes the City Council of Los Realejos.
In total there are 24 photos, two for each month of the year, one horizontal and one vertical, which capture the essence of a municipality that has great natural, ethnographic, cultural and social wealth, in each of its corners, a true treasure. for photography lovers.
The project of publishing a calendar arose 24 years ago by realejero photographer Isidro Felipe Acosta with the aim of promoting the historical photography archive of Los Realejos, one of the most important in the Canary Islands as it houses more than 15,000 digitized photos that were contributed in their day for the residents of the municipality.
It was in 2000 when the royal council took it for the first time to the International Tourism Fair (Fitur). There, Isidro Felipe realized that a table calendar was a good promotion for the municipality because if you like it, the person has it all year round on any piece of furniture and that means that many people see it.
The idea turned out to be a success to the point that neighbors go to the City Hall to ask for it and many of them collect it, especially when they are old photos. “At that time, there were not many municipalities in Spain that carried out this type of tourism promotion and therefore, Los Realejos, at the level of the Canary Islands, was innovative in that sense,” he emphasizes.
The man who was also a public employee and City Hall photographer for more than three decades was also in charge of editing municipal calendars for 23 years. All of them, except for the first one and last year, have been with black and white images, the rest were postcards from the 60s and the beginning of the century, characters from the municipality, or parties from the 40s and 50s. ” It has always been attractive in that sense and that is why many people collected it,” he points out.
This year the color was also repeated. But the main novelty, at the initiative of the City Council’s Communication Office, is that twelve photographers from the municipality participate and it is expected that different ones will do so next year because the idea is to make local artists known.
The authors, from January to December
Thus, the month of January is illustrated by Jairo Díaz; February by Rubén Toste; the one in March by José Damián Pérez; April by Efrén Yanes; that of May by Fermín Cabrera; June by Fátima Beatriz Hernández; July by Isidro González; August by Édgar Méndez; September corresponds to Isidro Felipe Acosta; October to Carlos Hernández Pérez; November to Manuel Bencomo; and finally, in December, to Aidyl Carrillo.
“Now, with the participation of a dozen local photographers for the first time, a new stage begins in which we, on this occasion, and those who join in future years, will record the large amount of ethnographic and natural resources that can be photographed. from Los Realejos. Thank you for having us,” declared Isidro Felipe Acosta on Thursday, during the presentation of the yearbook, in which the mayor, Adolfo González, and some of the participants were also present.
In total, the City Council has published 2,000 copies in addition to having its digital version hosted on the municipal website www.losrealejos.es.
Isidro Felipe remembers a very curious anecdote. It happened more than a decade ago, when the municipal representatives went to Turespaña to take the file for the May Festivals and Fires to be declared of National Tourist Interest and the person who received them had a Los Realejos calendar on the table.
“It is a traveling calendar, not only because it has been distributed throughout Spain, but because the neighbors who go to pick it up send it to their children and relatives who are studying or living in other countries, even in Venezuela and Cuba,” he points out. Isidro Felipe.
At the same time, he defends that both he and the rest of the participating photographers are of the opinion that history is written with images, and that photographers are notaries of our time, because we leave testimony of daily life,” said the photographer. .
Finally, he remembered Manuel El Rubio, Juan Dumas, Miguel Fernández and Juan González, “as lovers of photography who have helped over the years with their images to understand much of the future of Los Realejos from the 20th century onwards.” , with a legacy that comes very fresh to our days.”
