More than 6,000 people visit the island's museums every year
Writing about a place's past means opening the door to knowing those milestones that marked its history. In the middle of the Atlantic, the stories were followed by narratives of memory where there were pirate attacks, colonizations and maritime transit that had an obligatory stop in the Canary Islands. In this context, La Gomera was not left out, and thus, the stories that came from back, from the most ancient, were somehow stored in those chests with treasures that are today the museums of La Gomera. Both ethnographic and archaeological.
The president of the Cabildo, Casimiro Curbelo, assures that these spaces contribute “an important value to the island, because they condense a large part of its legacy so that residents, and also visitors, can learn about it from the dynamism and information provided in their rooms.” Proof of this is the gradual increase in the number of visitors that the centers register annually and which already exceeds 6,000, “thus contributing to the dissemination of the cultural, ethnographic and archaeological heritage of the island.”
Visiting the island's museums is like delving into the ins and outs of a multitude of small stories that took place on La Gomera. The insular Ethnographic Museum is located in a two-story building in the Las Hoyetas neighborhood, in the municipality of Hermigua. This space revives the customs and lives of its inhabitants based on social reality, and in it buildings, household utensils or tools, food and festive events, manufactures and ancient traditions come to life...
A different sense is provided by the Insular Archaeological Museum that occupies the Casa Echeverría in San Sebastián. In this case, the exhibition reflects the life of the ancient Gomeros, where they came from, how they settled, how they used natural resources, what they believed in, what they venerated or some of the elements they left us, such as the Silbo Gomero or much of our toponymy.
Island museums have gradually become research and education laboratories. The Minister of Heritage, Rosa Elena García, explains that several lines of work have been designed with an eye on protection and conservation; education and dissemination; research; management and coordination. These four axes constitute the areas in which the team of professionals located there work.
Garcia emphasizes that, in addition, among the measures in which work is carried out annually is the control and registration of the archaeological sites of the island, which includes the drafting and review of information on the sites that are being discovered. With this work, the so-called archaeological charts or inventories of the municipalities will be completed, which will provide a basis for undertaking other management, protection or even research projects.
In addition, the International Museum Day is celebrated annually and the Museum Forum is celebrated biannually, which this year promotes its VI edition. In educational matters, it highlights the relevance of having a pedagogical guide such as the Museum Educational Plan endorsed by specialists from the University of La Laguna; This year, the methodology applied by said plan will be subject to joint reflection in order to improve its quality and productivity. These weeks, CEO Santiago Apóstol has been able to use the center as an environment to learn stories about the island, while these young visitors had fun playing and feeding their creativity.
Continued research
One of the least known aspects of museums is that of the research coordinated by Juan Carlos Hernández. Throughout these years, collaboration strategies with the two Canarian universities have been strengthened, participating in research projects that are grouped in several fields: pastoral society, exploitation of the island coastline, calendar and ritual practices, the mountains during prehistory, rock manifestations, bioanthropology, weather during the prehistory of the island or historical archaeology.
With this organic perspective of research we intend to take ordered steps, with a specific orientation in the search for answers. An example is dating. Until recently we had a dozen dates on our island, some of which currently cannot be taken into account. Since last year we have 57 new dates for the prehistory of our island, which take us from contact with Europeans in the 15th century (Cuevas de Herrera González, Tazo-Alojera) to the first occupations of La Gomera. Today we can affirm that we have the archaeological site of prehistoric habitation with the oldest calibrated dating of the archipelago, on a short-lived element: El Lomito del Medio was occupied in the second half of the 1st century after Christ.
The results of the research are arriving little by little, they are long-distance paths that require dedication and commitment. Networking with companies, administrations and other museums, in addition to a multidisciplinary and collaborative vision at work, are other important keys. Research is the oxygen valve of any museum that seeks to know the history of a place; which is one of the purposes of the heritage that museums treasure. That is, knowing to know ourselves, learning from the past to project ourselves into the future.
