The Vox Group in the Santander City Council has presented a motion in the November plenary session to preserve the current maritime configuration of the South breakwater of the Molnedo dock, located in Puertochico, in order to avoid any action in that space that destroys its values historical and cultural.
This was announced by the councilor for training, Guillermo Pérez-Cosío, noting that this motion "comes in time to make people think" about a project of the PP for the amount of 1.5 million euros, which should be carried out this year at the breakwater Sur and that incorporates a large bison created by Okuda, "a work and an artist that represent the antithesis of the values of that place and even of the city of Santander."
For the mayor of Vox, "the historical and cultural references of the dock, with an unequivocal seafaring roots, are many" as recently stated by a civic group pointing out that we are in the presence of a place 'whose history forms its own essence and reason of being and that it should be treated with the knowledge and respect it deserves. '
Pérez-Cosío has warned that "in few activities it is possible to verify such a close influence or correlation between creative freedom and cultural destruction as with any of the actions called urban renewal or regeneration." These transformative processes have “shaken” the foundations of the intangible heritage of some communities many times.
Regarding this project in Molnedo, the councilor denounces an attempt to "transfer" to Santander what is happening in other places with social practices, traditional uses, living expressions of popular culture and festivities that "have almost completely disappeared, dragged by a renewing fury applied to old urban environments ”.
The councilor points out in the explanatory memorandum that "the clearest example of this metamorphosis" is London and its "innovative" projects undertaken during the two decades of the "conservative" government of Margaret Thatcher, which managed to give a notable boost to private investment in "depressed" urban areas. But, as a result of all these "modernizing efforts", today it can be said that London is no longer an "English" city.
The mayor also adds that to these changes is added that in that city “along with the skyscrapers, the bell towers are disappearing to become minarets as a visible sign, not of the multiculturalism so desired by some, but of a monoculture that in the West is devastating with everything".
"The people of Santander want the city to maintain its identity and traditional cultural values and for this reason they try to prevent this project, announced at the time as an electoral promise, from following the path of previous ones that disguise their own personality and signs," he concluded Pérez-Cosío.
