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Monday, May 07, 2007
Slow news Sunday, lets change a name
Yesterday must have been a very slow news day here, because Canarias7 found it necessary to devote a page of comment to the editorial in Tenerife newspaper El Día. And, I guess I'm only making matters worse by taking it a step further. :)
It's not the first time this has been brought up, but starting with an idea presented by a reader in a letter to El Día's editor, the newspaper is supporting calls for a demonstration to defend changing the name of Gran Canaria to just Canaria.
Our neighbours, opine certain readers and, by implication, presumably El Día's editorial staff, do not deserve the "grandiose" title of Gran (Grand / Great).
What El Día's editorial actually says is that "The support which we feel from the Tenerife and Canarian populations and from our readers, obliges us to not move backwards (i.e. move forward) in the persistence in soliciting somebody with intelligence and good will to correct the errors." Apparently, they've received hundreds and hundreds of letters, emails and faxes supporting the name change idea.
As they say, it causes confusion and leads people to perceive the islands incorrectly.
Calling it Gran Canaria, which effectively suggests that it's The Big Canary Island, is geographically and logically wrong. You can't deny that. Tenerife is the largest of the Canary Islands, followed by Fuerteventura and Gran Canaria comes in third. Anyone who didn't know that, probably would assume it's the largest from the name. 
Whoever had the idea to split the Canary Islands into two provinces back in 1927, was in my personal opinion, barking mad, or just overly fond of officious bureaucracy.
For those who don't know, the province of "Las Palmas de Gran Canaria" includes the three eastern islands of Gran Canaria, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, while the province of "Santa Cruz de Tenerife" includes the four western ones of Tenerife, La Palma, La Gomera and El Hierro. The two capital island's capitals are first, those individual island's capitals, as well as being the two province's capitals and are the names of the two provinces too. Thus, to start with, it gets as confusing as the surrealistic plot of Soap (Enredo) working out in which capacity the name is being used.
Each municipality (there are 87 in all on the seven islands) has it's own town hall, council and mayor and each of the seven islands also has its own capital and Cabildo (Corporation). Simple logic tells you that there must be some duplication and that all it did, apart from creating public administration jobs, was to create a constant "my one is bigger than your one" rivalry, instead of creating a unified atmosphere under which all seven islands could have worked together and actually done something.
Tenerife does also have the highest mountain, Santa Cruz in Tenerife is already the seat of the Canary Islands Parliament and was the capital of the single province from 1833 to 1927, so there's an historical precedent. But for certain, nobody in Gran Canaria is going to see any good will in that idea nor in changing their name!
'El Día' plantea una gran manifestación para cambiar el nombre de Gran Canaria
