If this had happened in Maspalomas, Las Palmas would be busting out TV channels selling live broadcasts to Madrid. Smoke climbs the walls as if misfortune had nails. Black, dirty, insatiable. They call it a fire, but this was something else. It was the ashes of a truth that no one wants to tell in this city that pretends nothing is happening. That saw nothing. That doesn't burn when it burns. That masks the disaster if those burned don't wear German flip-flops or British visas in the south of Gran Canaria.
At 39 Doctor Miguel Rosas Street, in the very heart of the Las Canteras neighborhood, which exudes what they don't show in the Turespaña brochures, a building caught fire early Wednesday morning. The flames bit from below, as if poverty had a blowtorch at every corner. And inside, sixty souls, twelve wounded, a three-year-old child evacuated to the Materno, a resident in serious condition at the Negrín Hospital. But who cares when you're not a tourist with travel insurance?
Of the sixty evicted, forty-eight were tourists—yes, tourists, even if the official report doesn't say so. They came from Mauritania, with money, with a desire to spend at Mesa y López what the stingy French and the digital nomads who roam the city like ambassadors of the future no longer have. Those Africans who here don't want to call tourists because that would imply acknowledging that there's gold in their skin tanned by the Sahel sun. The Mesa y López Shopping District has never dedicated a single post to them on social media for their national day every November 28th. Someone should ask the department stores, opticians, children's clothing stores, or franchised restaurant chains about the Mauritanians' huge sums of money. They prefer French people.
The city calls them "visitors," as if they're just passing through to bother anyone. As if they don't leave €600.000 a week in the shopping district alone. As if their money isn't worth the same as that of the German who eats sausages for breakfast in Playa del Inglés. The institutional silence is brutal. There's no communication, no protocol, no relocation. Let them sort themselves out, don't bother anyone, don't get in the picture.
The fire started at 1:14. Furniture on the sidewalk, shouts in the stairwell, and smoke rising like a bad omen. Some say it was a cigarette butt, others that someone was preparing a construction project downstairs. All suspect that someone lit it with more intention than carelessness. The truth is, the flames danced for six hours, and when they died down, the building was a sooty skeleton.
The Forensic Police are investigating. All hypotheses are being considered, except for the one that truly matters: that the lives that were destroyed there don't weigh equally in the media spotlight because they don't have the proper passports. That Mauritanian tourists don't fit on the Las Palmas postcard, even though they pay more for a pair of pants at Zara than an Erasmus student for their entire stay.
And now, after the applause for the firefighters and the medical reports, the echo of contempt remains. What remains is the fear that someone sowed with a vile lie: that if they stayed, the police would descend on them. As if they were illegal immigrants, as if they hadn't come with a return ticket. They left clothes, suitcases, dignity on the sooty sidewalk, because someone told them they weren't welcome here. Las Palmas hides. Las Palmas is silent. Because here, if you don't burn in English or German, you don't burn. In Las Palmas, fire isn't news if it incinerates the invisible. If this had happened in Maspalomas, the TV networks would be jumping in Las Palmas, selling live broadcasts to Madrid.
