La Gomera, yes, the island of seagulls and the "Silbo Gomero." An anthem, a trademark, a heritage of humanity. The official narrative, the one repeated in Parliament, in schools even in the south of the island in the face of the ignorance of teachers and in the offices of the Ministry of Education, is that the silbo is their own doing. Exclusive. As if God, in his infinite wisdom, had whispered only on the slopes of La Gomera. But that's not the case. It's a big lie, one of those that, by dint of repetition, seem like biblical truths. In 2022, Canarias 7 reported that only a few elderly people in Tirajana and Mogán use the Gran Canarian silbo.
The Gran Canarian whistle, the one that resonates in the ravines of La Aldea, Mogán, and Tirajana, has been dying for hundreds of years. Not because of a lack of history, but because of neglect. And worse: because of cultural centralism, because of political marketing. The La Gomera Socialist Party (ASG) has launched a crusade to ensure that no one speaks of the whistle of the shepherds of the south. So that the echoes of Tejeda and Artenara are silenced under the hegemony of La Gomera. And in this pantomime, the Gran Canarian deputies of the PP and PSOE nod, applaud, and look the other way. An act of cowardice worthy of a post-war soap opera. Even if the whistle is from Tirajana, it will be called the Gomero whistle of Tirajana.
The oldest shepherds, those who retain the language of the air in their memories, are the last to remember it. Jacinto Ortega, 83, recalls the time when a whistle was enough to direct cattle for miles. Robustiano Delgado, 67, learned to communicate in complete sentences in Tasarte, without a cell phone, without gigabytes or flat rates. But that memory dies. It goes with the elderly, with the abandonment of the countryside, with modernity that doesn't look back, even though in Turkey and the Himalayas, the whistle is also used to communicate for centuries.
The paradox, of course, is that while children on La Gomera are taught the "official" version of the silbo, here in the south, nothing is done. The legacy of the goatherds and shepherds is in danger of disappearing without anyone defending it. And it won't just be because of the passage of time, but also because of the political pettiness that, in the name of a supposed cultural monopoly, is robbing Gran Canaria of its voice. It's a sad story, just another one. A story of a heritage dying by the wayside, without anyone daring to speak the truth out loud.
