The Canary Islands will definitively cease to be only seven. There were already eight on the charter of the Statute of Autonomy, approved in 2018, which included La Graciosa, north of Lanzarote. But soon they will also be in the anthem. This Monday, the Government of the Canary Islands published a report favorable to the bill approved by all parliamentary groups except Vox to make the changes. As indicated by the deputy minister of the Presidency and spokesperson, Alfonso Cabello, after the Government Council held in the capital of Gran Canaria, it is a question of “adapting” the letter “in congruence with the new Statute of Autonomy for 2018”. For the same reason, the report of the Government of the Canary Islands “also considers the need to adapt the shield of the Canary Islands to this new reality and to modify it by also recognizing that eighth island”, in reference to the territory. island, of just 27 square kilometers.
A law approved in April 2003 provided, after a difficult process, the text of the official anthem of the Canary Islands. So, to the tune of Arrorró of the Cantos Canarios, by the Tenerife composer Teobaldo Power (1848-1884), a text by the ethnographer, folklorist and musician Benito Cabrera was approved. This included the verse “distributed into seven rocks” in reference to the number of islands then in existence.
In 2018, the new Statute recognized La Graciosa as an island of the archipelago, although it was still administratively added to the island of Lanzarote. Therefore, the territorial scope of the Canary Islands was limited to seven islands with their own administration and, in addition, to the island of La Graciosa and the uninhabited islets of the Chinijo archipelago (to which La Graciosa itself belongs).
Seven years later, in October, all the political groups in the regional Parliament, except Vox, supported the bill promoted by the Canary Islands Coalition. The reform that is being implemented is “strictly symbolic and technical-legal”, according to the bill: it does not alter the melody, it does not modify the protection regime or the uses of the anthem. The adjustment will be limited to the replacement of a figure in the third line of the poem, which will go from “seven” to “eight”, leaving the rest of the text unchanged. “This preserves the literary integrity of the anthem, avoiding reopening an aesthetic or musical debate.” The beginning of the hymn, thus, will read “I am the shadow of an almond tree / I am a volcano, saltpeter and lava, / distributed between eight rocks / beats the heartbeat of my soul”.
The modification of the shield is not included in this proposal, as Cabello himself pointed out. The spokesperson clarified that in the case of the shield it is a balancing act because “it is within the scope of the Statute of Autonomy, an organic law, and therefore it is up to the Congress of Deputies to make this change”. Therefore “we invite you to modify the anthem and we also evaluate the request to modify the coat of arms of the autonomous community”.
