After two and a half months of little crowded shows and efforts of the City Council to justify it, the Festival of the Lantern, located against the will of the neighbors a public park of Malaga closed for this private event, it is already history. This Saturday has celebrated its latest functions, while outside hundreds of neighbors of the West Park met again. In these months he has set a powerful neighborhood, transverse, independently spontaneous and finally organized movement, capable of dealing with the City Council, which always put on the side of the promoters. The movement has ended up getting the mayor to admit that locating the festival has not been a good idea.
This Saturday some 300 neighbors have celebrated the end of the festival as a victory, because it is taken for granted that will not be held again in this space, despite the fact that the contract between the promoters (Ximenez illuminations and their Chinese partner Lantern Group) and the City Council includes up to two years of optional extension. “It had to have been more consensual,” said Mayor Francisco de la Torre a few days ago: “We will make a joint reflection with the neighbors to see if it is feasible in terms compatible with the park, or rather not. I think it will be rather. ”
In a city crossed by conflicts that oppose the right to the city against pure business (housing and tourist apartments, the landslides of the port, the urban forest), privatization for five months of 33,000 square meters of public park for the benefit of A private interest has galvanized the neighbors. The opposition has played its role, and today has come to celebrate neighborhood success against the “privatizer eagerness” of the mayor. “We Malaga want to be neighbors, not customers,” said Toni Valero (Sumar). “Not everything is for sale,” said Nicolás Sguiglia (with Malaga). “It’s a social and tower victory, you must apologize,” said Daniel Pérez (PSOE). But the prominence has been of the neighbors.
Assemblies and concentrations every week
It does not seem, in view of what there was this Saturday in the park, that the opposition to the festival is reversible. “First it was spontaneous, and then we have organized ourselves,” says Rocío Santos, while songs alluding to the neighborhood fight sound and, finally, a plaque that renowned the central square of the Park is discovered as “Plaza del Movemento Neighborhood.”
Every Wednesday, neighbors have gathered in an assembly; And every weekend, without failing any except Kings Day, hundreds of neighbors have been concentrated at the access door to the festival. Children, many older who have been deprived of their walking area, young people who played sports in this place. From one day to another, the park was left in half. 33,700 square meters of the 74,000 that the park has were fenced by opaque plates. Nor look could.
The animals that were there (it is recognized as a zoo) disappeared. In addition, the event gave a pit to the park through its central area, forcing the walkers who still wanted to circulate through their margins to leave the park and cross a double -meaning road with a ground change.
Criminalized by councilor Teresa Porras
The outrage outraged a notable part of the neighbors. The waters that councilor Teresa Porras did not help to calm the waters. He began by ninging the protests (“criticisms have no substance”); He received the neighbors in the town hall (“we will have to call the police”); He criminalized them, ensuring that he had observed violent attitudes (“a violence as never seen in a demonstration,” he said without providing any evidence); And finally tried to link them to political groups, filtering that the police had identified several IU leaders, an issue that has been denounced before the data protection agency.
In the weeks before Christmas, the neighbors celebrated more than one assembly with the presence of the police, which identified them on more than one occasion and urged them to separate for exceeding 20 people. “There has been police harassment,” says Antonio González, who remembers that a police cordon became deployed to separate the neighbors from visitors. It all started to calm down with the New Year.
The truth is that the concentrations were peaceful and starred mainly by children and adults, neighbors of the neighborhood who denounced the plundering of a public space for the sake of a purely private interest. “Parque yes, no business,” was the most repeated poster in the area.
An event well below expectations
The event has failed if created expectations are taken into account. The promoters were waiting for 250,000 visitors between November 30 and February 15. Between 15 and 20 euros the entrance expected to enter about 4.5 million euros. But in the absence of official figures, it seems clear that the result is far from those figures. “There have been days during the week in which there was an artist with dishes on stage, and no spectator,” says Víctor González, a neighbor of Parque del Oeste, who has been publishing videos recorded from the adjoining buildings every day, where he is observed A soulless space. Nor has it been a great success, and assistance was only remarkable during Christmas. “It is clear that he had no interest to citizens.”
Not even public school excursions hide the puncture. The mayor admitted: “There have been many fewer people than I had calculated. From the business point of view, I think it has a negative result. ” “There have been school excursions during the morning, despite being a festival of night lights,” says González. The Diputación de Málaga published a tender to transport children from other parts of the province, for 15,000 euros. It was finally deserted.
The City Council closed the park for this in exchange for 100,000 euros. A scarce canon for the expected business figure (4.5 million) and forcibly conceded in the cheapest possible section of the ordinance that regulates the collection of rates for the private use of public roads. Thus, he considered that he fit “craft fairs, commercial exhibitions and the like”, and set an output (minimum) fee of 69,729.30 euros (784.77 euros per day for 88 days), which the promoter rose to 100,000.
The truth is that the park will be privately occupied almost five months (150 days), and that there is a section of the ordinance that sets the rate for “shows and attractions” between 0.4 and 0.73 euros per square meter and day. That is, to apply that section the City Council could have demanded a minimum of 13,480 euros per day, and not 784.
After the show, there is a certain sense of relief after indignation. And the idea that all the effort of the City Council has been at all. “It was said that it would revitalize the economy of the area, and it has actually hurt, because they had their own food beach bar,” they recall. The neighbors now expect to check how everything looks. “There are anchors on the grass, and it is not clear where the animals are.”
There is also a neighborhood movement. “We have achieved a wonderful precedent: if we go out and meet we are able to change everything,” Yolanda said when discovering the plaque that celebrates it.
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