THE EMPIRE OF MEDIOCRITY

For two years, two long years, La Coruña, our beloved city, has ceased to be news falling into a kind of dark nebula that covers it completely, thus preventing its reflections from projecting beyond its local borders.

A city devoid of projects, devoid of hope, devoid of vision beyond its own limits, is a city that is condemned to have no future, to be immersed in a dangerous ostracism whose consequences will be paid for many years and that debt alone We will pay for the Coruña.

We just have to look at the television news that every day offers the different TV channels to observe that we no longer talk about La Coruna at all.

While in other large and small cities, exhibitions, major congresses, musical festivals, bullfights, major festivals, Holy Week, major sporting events, theatrical releases, personalities, etc. are news of The first order that usually closes the news, La Coruna seems to have ceased to exist, being out of all circuits. Never a good news that has our city on stage is not even a second in these television appointments with the news.

We stopped being that cosmopolitan and avant-garde city that we were once, with great concerts, unforgettable exhibitions, visits of the first level, to become a kind of mediocre entity that is not very well known why he walks, much less where he goes.

La Coruña is a city of eminently services and should be clearly aimed at attracting tourist flows, however this does not seem to matter to anyone. We have only to walk through the Old City to observe, with sadness, the lamentable state of abandonment and dirt in which it is plunged. Its walls were full of painted many of them of terrible taste; Its streets with the pavement dangerously raised; Its abandoned gardens, many of them carpeted with leaves that are not collected; Its monuments poorly lit or simply extinguished. A disaster if we bear in mind that it is a must for those who visit us.

But there is more, much more. The Tower of Hercules area, a World Heritage Site, presents the same unfortunate aspect, with its green areas "a monte", its broken benches, its signposts destroyed. A total abandonment like the one that presents the public lighting of the Paseo Marítimo, especially in its vicinity to the Tower, where dozens of lamps are counted, many of them without tulipa. And that is precisely one of the windows of the city, that in its run to our millenary lighthouse tour tourists from all over the world.

The walls of sea, recovered a few years ago, already begin to be grass of the ivy and the weeds. The door of San Miguel, the one for which Spanish monarchs will embark, still does not recover covered by a fence that presents a regrettable state, unworthy to be observed by anyone.

Let us not talk about the lighting of the ground of the brand new avenues of Montoto and Marina whose majority of the lamps are broken or fused, not lighting them now. Even of the four reflectors that illuminate the monument to Maria Pita, two of them have been fused for months without anyone having bothered to change the light bulbs knowing that the square is visited by many outsiders.

The gardens of Méndez Núñez and la Rosaleda, once the city's pride, are today only a caricature of what they were, finding themselves immersed in the greatest abandonment and abandonment, some of their statues having disappeared and the weeds growing by Everywhere.

Even the Angel who finishes the eighteenth fountain of fame in the Plaza de la Fuente de San Andrés appears with an absurd gesture, as if he were casting a "trumpet" in the air, missing the musical instrument he carried in his hand.

The great congresses have gone down in history; The Opera season has been relegated to the background; The shows as well as the parties are of an overwhelming mediocrity; There are no first-class sports events. Nothing, nothing at all.

We live in the empire of mediocrity and it seems that no one cares, at least that's what it looks like.

Unfortunately, even our beloved Deportivo is not news like it was once.

Luckily still part of the time mentions La Coruna and for that, not always for the better.

José Eugenio Fernández Barallobre.