El Tablero celebrates its 27th Harvest Fair

 

The village of El Tablero will celebrate its 27th Annual Harvest Festival on Friday and Saturday, June 12th and 13th. This year's ethnographic event, organized by the Department of Culture, will focus on the traditional trades that helped shape the social, cultural, and economic identity of the community.

 

 

The program for this cultural initiative, which seeks to perpetuate the sharecropping origins of El Tablero in the local memory, was presented this Wednesday by Mayor Marco Aurelio Pérez Sánchez, along with the Councilor for the Primary Sector and Food Sovereignty of the Gran Canaria Island Council, Miguel Hidaldo Sánchez, and the Councilors for Culture and Education, Elena Álamo Vega and Esther Delgado Sánchez.

 

Hidalgo highlighted the staging of this fair. “The harvest is not something lost in time, but rather a relatively recent activity that was fundamental to the origin of El Tablero, whose landscape still bears witness to what it was and what it meant for the lives of many people who came from all over the island of Gran Canaria. It is something that identifies us and represents our food sovereignty. It is a very important ethnographic heritage for understanding our roots,” stated the Councilor for the Primary Sector of the Island Council, who congratulated the Department of Culture “for maintaining traditions so that they serve as a reference for future generations, because behind every crate of tomatoes there is an important personal and family story.”

 

Marco Aurelio Pérez praised “the community work behind this fair, which stems from the participation and involvement of groups, associations, and individuals. The sum of their efforts is what makes the continuity of this event possible, allowing us to celebrate its 27th edition this year,” said the mayor, who also highlighted the diverse origins of the El Tablero fair, not only from all corners of Gran Canaria, but even from the islands of Fuerteventura and Lanzarote.

 

Elena Álamo announced that on Friday the 12th, following the open drawing and painting class for children from the Southern Popular University, which will begin at 17:00 PM at the Carmelo Pérez Rodríguez Cultural Center, and whose theme will be the world of the sugarcane harvest in the young artists' work plan, a theatrical tour of corners of the town will be offered. The aim of the tour is to recount the history of the old professions that developed throughout the last century in El Tablero to facilitate the lives of its residents. This historical tour will begin at 19:30 PM in the children's park located behind the church. Álamo highlighted the "important collective work behind this production, especially by the town's residents themselves, who have contributed their firsthand experiences to the script of the tour."

 

Later, at around 20:30 p.m., also at the Carmelo Pérez Rodríguez Cultural Center, the awards ceremony for the poster competition for this La Zafra Fair will take place. The Culture and Education departments coordinated the competition with all the secondary schools in the municipality "to involve new generations in the research, dissemination and enhancement of the cultural heritage linked to the traditions of our past that this ethnographic event encompasses," Elena Álamo emphasized.

 

Friday's harvest festival will conclude at 21:00 p.m. in El Tablero Square, the epicenter of the celebration, with a performance by the musical group La Trova, directed by Eliezer Benítez.

 

The day on Saturday the 13th, as announced by Esther Delgado, will be dedicated from 12:00 until 20:30, when the traditional dance will begin with the Parranda Los Horcones and the Agrupación La Cucaña, to the traditional display of crafts, musical performances, sale of local products, tasting of traditional harvest foods, traditional games, exhibitions of the shepherd's leap and the Canarian stick fighting, craft workshops, show-cooking sessions with tastings by the local chef Aridani Alonso, children's storytelling and a reading corner dedicated to Canarian literature and the agricultural world of the South and its tourist awakening.