Seven Doors: problems with no way out

Reiteration is not always the friend of news. But in this neighborhood, insistence is the form that rebellion and protest take. «Nothing has changed, except a part of concrete that they have thrown him on the road,” explains the secretary of the Las Medianías federation of neighborhood associations, Benito Monagas.

As he walks along the path that falls over the Guiniguada on the back of a sewer pipe perforated by oblivion, he summarizes the feeling of the neighborhood: «Inmaculada Medina (Councilor of Territorial Coordination) is neither there nor is she expected; “The person responsible is the mayor, Carolina Darias.”

«This must be resolved because the fecal water “They leave constantly,” he continues. She refers to the pipe that pulses under the vein of the ravine, emerging here and there in the form of chips that let the black blood escape from it. The lush vegetation that grows on both sides of the path is the witness of constant fertilization. Sometimes, the machete is the only way to enter this area.

They’ve been like this for more than ten years. Time has only brought them one new thing, a layer of concrete at the start of the road. And a brick door that condemns neighborhood access as soon as it opens. “It is a work that Rafael Hernández is doing (investigated by the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office of Las Palmas after a complaint for the alleged use of migrant minors on his lands),” said Monagas, “when they open the door, they close our access to the road and In addition, the sewer has been moved.

“Once I had to ask a worker to allow me to cross onto the public road,” adds the neighborhood representative. He assures that the public channel has been “affected by the work, but even so the City Council of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria looks the other way.”

The complaints raised with the Mediation and Coexistence Unit of the Local Police (UMEC) had a patrol go to the scene. On March 13, the agents prepared a report that has already been submitted to the Landscape Protection service of the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria City Council.

After the first concrete slurry, the road returns to the situation it had a few decades ago. It is structured on a column of fecal water that runs through a fiber cement artery, where the material resists, because where the original pipe has disappeared, it has been replaced by a type of hard plastic on which blobs of cement have been stamped that serve so as not to lose step.

His voice resonates in the ravine, but it does not reach the City Hall of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. The president of the Las Medianías federation, Miguel Almeida, regrets that the echo does not reach the sixth floor of the municipal offices, where the mayor’s office is located. «The mayor has restricted to the neighborhood movement“, does not even attend to the federation,” laments this representative of the city’s social groups, “the councilor of the Tamaraceite-San Lorenzo-Tenoya district, Esther Lidia Martín, has good will and told us that she was going to call us to a meeting with the general director of Water of the City Council (Isabel María Armas), but we have not seen anything.

It is not the only sanitation problem that the neighborhood has. In the 2019 participatory budgets, the placement of sewerage in Andújar was selected as viable, a project that required an investment of 75,000 euros. “It was about doing two wells sewage collection and a pipe to pour into the sanitation network,” said the vice president of the Las Medianías federation of neighborhood associations. In this way, it would be possible to take this disseminated system to the sewer, “but it has neither been planned nor executed.”

Nor has the public transport offer changed much. Since 2018, when the possibility of combining taxi and bus services was raised, there has only been progress in conversations. “We only have two busesat eight in the morning and at three,” explains Benito Monagas, who details that the descent of the ravine affected by wastewater leaks is the path that many residents use to catch the bus in La Calzada.

Lack of cleanliness is another universal constant in Siete Puertas. Not only is there still waiting for the clearing of the weeds, promised for August 2023, but the Cabildo of Gran Canaria has undertaken the promised cleaning of the Las Galgas ravine, between Siete Puertas and Dragonal, where there is also “a river of black waters.

The presence of asbestosin the form of uralite sheets, in some areas of Siete Puertas is another of the concerns of the residents of this neighborhood.