Flick bequeaths his industrial collection to the Elder Museum

The president of the Cordial Hotels chain, Jürgen Flick, has donated the Flick Group's collection of industrial machinery to the Elder Museum of Science and Technology in Las Palmas. The event was chaired by the director of the informative space, José Gilberto Moreno; and the president of the Port Authority of Las Palmas, Beatriz Calzada. The agreement has been sponsored by the collectors association Accomar and the Canary Islands Maritime Culture entity, Accumar. Natalia Flick was present at the event, moved by the symbolism that represents for the Flick family another example of its roots in the archipelago since 1930, José Juan Rodríguez Castillo, Sebastián Grisaleña and Ángel Ruiz Quesada, among others.

 

The collection consists of 43 pieces of industrial machinery dating from 1930, when Harol Flick arrived in the Canary Islands. He confessed to the twenty guests at the signing that the conservation and maintenance of the collection has not been easy. "Being a collector is practically a half illness," said the president of Cordial. "It's exciting, but it requires permanent personal effort," he added. José Gilberto Moreno declared that the transfer has been an "act of generosity." "We act as guards and custodians of the equipment, but we do not act as owners," he said, as they have been "very careful" that the ownership of the equipment remains in the Flick family.

 

 

 

Flick Group, shareholder since the founding of Cordial Hotels when it was Amigos HBA with Lothar Siemens and Sergio Alonso, among others, was founded by Harald Flick in 1930 and currently constitutes one of the most relevant business groups in the archipelago. Throughout these years, it has managed to amass an important collection of machines, tools and utensils of diverse nature, belonging to some of the most representative sectors of industrial activity on the island of Gran Canaria in the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries: metallurgy and shipbuilding, above all. Beatriz Calzada recalled that "a society that forgets its history is condemned to disappear", justifying the importance of institutions "doing our task of collecting all that heritage that is in private hands" which sometimes results in a "problem of space and storage but also not understanding the value. 

 

In Germany, in the city of Kirn, since 2006, a person who has made a special voluntary contribution to the social and cultural sector receives the 'Honorary Harald Flick Award of the City of Kirn' every autumn. The decision to award the Harald Flick Medal is made by a board of trustees chaired by the mayor and made up of a representative of the Flick family. In 1957, Harald Flick created the Maximilian Flick Foundation, named after his father, which he supported financially over the following years until his death. The foundation aims to enable the mayor of Kirn to help the city's citizens in emergency situations in a non-bureaucratic way. The foundation also aims to promote the city's cultural interests.