The Cabildo de Tenerife (governed by the Canarian Coalition and the PP) has initiated procedures to protect the monument to Franco. This is indicated in the Official Gazette of the Canary Islands (BOC) of this Friday, which specifies that the Island Corporation takes this decision after a judgment last June in which it was ordered to process a declaration file of Property d Cultural Interest (BIC). sculpture.
“This act is issued in accordance with a final judicial decision, so no administrative appeal can be filed against it,” underlines the BOC.
The BOC announcement indicates that the Royal Canarian Academy of Fine Arts of San Miguel Arcángel and the Association for Research and Protection of Heritage of San Miguel Arcángel have requested the opening of the procedure for declaring property cultural interest, with the Monument category, in favor of the Sculpture of Juan de Ávalos García Taborda.
This request was resolved by the island director of Coordination and Support to the President on March 9, 2022 (when the PSOE governed the Cabildo), in which both requests were rejected.
However, a contentious-administrative appeal was presented by the Association for Research and Protection of the Heritage of San Miguel Arcángel and the Court issued a judgment on June 28, 2024, confirming the contentious-administrative appeal promoted, condemning the Island Council from Tenerife. to open a file for the BIC declaration of the Juan de Ávalos monument.
Let us recall that in 2022, after a “rigorous” analysis of the study by the University of La Laguna on this subject and the report of the Technical Unit of Historical Heritage of the Government of the Canary Islands, the Cabildo (then led by the PSOE) has determined that it lacks exceptional artistic values.
Judge María Isabel Pardo Vivero Alsina, in her June ruling, ruled in favor of the San Miguel Arcángel Association for Research and Artistic Heritage, which in the previous term had asked the Cabildo de Tenerife to submit the declaration of property of interest to the government of the Canary Islands. BIC), located at the intersection of Avenida de Anaga and Rambla de Santa Cruz.
This association is the same one that appealed to the courts against the Catalog of Francoist remains of the capital of Tenerife, prepared by the Government of the Canary Islands during the last legislature, and the same one that placed posters throughout the city to defend the sculpture. in honor of the dictator.
In the judgment, the judge evaluates the expert reports: two of them delve deeper into the BIC declaration of the monument and its alleged artistic values (one report by Santiago Milans del Bosch and another by Eugenio Togores). There is a third party taken into account (by order of the Cabildo de Tenerife) who opposes this.
“Explicit mention is made of the content of the expert reports because they were provided and admitted as evidence in this procedure. However, what happens in this procedure is not to evaluate its content, but to evaluate the existence of expert reports of the applicant, which determine the existence of sufficient and sufficient evidence to proceed with the opening of the interested file, because it is not “It is a simple request from a citizen, not accompanied by any proof of artistic value, and that the evaluation of the content of the reports is carried out within the framework of “a regulated administrative procedure and not outside of it”, explains the judge.
For this reason, “the Island Council of Tenerife is ordered to open a file for the declaration of the Juan de Ávalos monument as BIC, without making a condemnatory declaration on the procedural costs”.
