People who celebrate their progress renew their energy and broaden their horizons. It's what we do today
Thirty-five years after the birth of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, ours, we can feel proud and proud to see that this project that emerged from the firm will of an entire island has fulfilled its mission of contributing decisively to the process of social transformation through the contribution of knowledge and innovation.
Thousands of students who would never have achieved higher education have been able to graduate. The economic, social and cultural life of the island and the archipelago has gained talent and creativity. The university values of freedom and rationality have improved the coexistence of our society.
The University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria is part of the identity of Gran Canaria and bears the DNA of a society that has shown that it is capable of organizing itself and raising a clear and unique voice when necessary in defense of its legitimate aspirations. That mobilization contained many desires and forced alliances and even governments to change. Grandparents who had not had an education cried out for the rights of their grandsons and granddaughters.
The civic movement that led to its origin unleashed a citizen wind that involved all sectors of the island, to the point of knocking down a wall of obstacles, denials and resistance. In this act, people who knew how to channel the enormous social energy of that demand are distinguished. And, sadly, others have been left to us, such as Lorenzo Olarte Cullen, who as president of the Government of the Canary Islands promoted the Law that actually created the University.
Four decades later, that historic citizen movement serves as an example of Gran Canaria's capacity to achieve its objectives; although it is also a reminder that essential rights as islanders and as Gran Canarian people take too much time and effort to materialize and consolidate. Our educational history since the 19th century is the chronicle of exclusion and neocolonial abandonment.
The University is a particularly significant event in the history of Gran Canaria and the Canary Islands to counterbalance the conditions of our geographical location and territorial fragmentation. The very creation of the Cabildos, the provincial division or the defense of our jurisdictions are manifestations of the island's push to have an administrative structure that meets its needs and a legally recognized reality.
University and Cabildo are in some way twinned entities, since they shared the same cradle, rocked by the hand of the popular mandate. Likewise, the extension of education was, from its beginnings, 111 years ago, one of the fundamental elements of the Cabildo's action.
Following the precept set by Benito Pérez Galdós, when he stated that “the greatest misery is ignorance”, this Institution made possible the opening of the first institute on the island in 1916, the beginning of a long series of actions in the educational field throughout of decades that included the creation of the Las Palmas University College.
In this joyful celebration I want to solemnly renew commitments and demands. The University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria has and will have the institutional, economic and social impulse of the Cabildo of Gran Canaria to overcome the challenges of the new society that we are giving birth to. And at the same time I ask the university community, faculty, students and PAS to intensify their social projection and help us guarantee an island with energy, water and food sovereignty, with rights and social equality and with self-centered economic development that takes advantage of talent. of our young people.
In coherence with this vision of the University, the Cabildo of Gran Canaria has strengthened a close strategic relationship with the increase of programs, agreements and lines of support to have the irreplaceable view of experts from the university world on essential issues for our present. and future.
The range of initiatives in which we go hand in hand to promote and guide decisive sectors in the development of our island covers adaptation to climate change, energy transition, water and territory management, the blue economy, I projects. +D+i, the primary sector, employment generation, tourism modernization, historical memory, international solidarity or landscape recovery.
We are walking a path of progress together.
Paths that lead me,
shaded with hope,
to rocks that do not cloud
already stones in love
to dialogue with the tops
of dreams that are not achieved.
This is how Pedro García Cabrera sings to us.
We know where we come from and where we want to go. I wish that as many of us as those of us who were on the streets would participate in this journey.
Congratulations
