Slacklining Activity Threatens Protected Guanche Site
The heritage group Imastanen reported on Monday, the day before Three Kings’ Day, on events that occurred on the first day of 2026 in the municipality of Guía de Isora in Tenerife’s south. The president of a local residents’ association informed them of an attack on cultural heritage taking place in a ravine area declared a Site of Cultural Interest (BIC). At this site, which contains numerous Guanche rock engravings, a group of people had placed anchors and ropes spanning hundreds of metres to traverse the protected ravine for slacklining (or Highline) activities.
Swift Response from Authorities
Upon learning of the incident, the group contacted the Environmental Department of the Tenerife Island Council (Cabildo). The following day, on 2 January, an officer from the island administration (from the West Territorial Management Unit) and a member of Imastanen visited the site, verifying and confirming the resident’s complaint. Subsequently, officers from the Guardia Civil and the Guía de Isora Local Police also attended, drawing up an official report and taking details of the people presumed responsible for the ropes and anchors.
The community representative was concerned that the anchors might have affected some of the many rock engravings. After inspecting the site, both the council officer and the member of the social archaeology collective confirmed the anchors were installed on stones just metres from the panels of rock engravings, which fortunately showed no apparent damage. However, the movement of people who chose this spot for highline practice could have endangered this BIC, which is also located within the forest crown. “They certainly did not have any type of permit authorising any activity in the area,” censured the group.
A Pattern of Irresponsibility and Systemic Failures
For Imastanen, this represents another act of irresponsibility towards cultural and natural heritage. “Thanks to the swift action of the Security Forces and the Environmental officers who attended the site, the ropes and equipment associated with this activity were removed,” they highlighted. They also recalled previously reporting damage to this very site, where shotgun pellets caused irreparable harm to one panel of engravings.
The group points out that while these heritage assets are catalogued and protected on paper by their legal status, in practice they lack any signage or preventive measures to alert people to their presence and, therefore, to warn of their value and avoid this type of illegal activity. They praised the rapid action of the Environmental officers against adventure sports practitioners who decided to turn this ravine in southwest Tenerife into their personal playground.
However, despite the prompt collaboration of the technicians and officers responsible for heritage custody and natural protection, they denounced that the fact the officer had to travel from Icod de los Vinos in the north of the island to Guía de Isora speaks, once again, of the limitations affecting those trying to do their jobs. This is precisely due to a shortage of deployed personnel and the many technical shortcomings under which they must operate.
“The limitation of human resources and technical means in such sensitive areas as these means that, in many other cases, citizen complaints remain unresolved due to the impossibility of intervening before damage occurs and before the perpetrators of these crimes can be identified and, therefore, sanctioned based on their legal liability,” stated Imastanen.
Foreign Offenders and Further Violations
The group also criticises that, even when offenders are sanctioned, fines often prove ineffective, as they frequently involve foreign citizens for whom it is impossible to guarantee fiscal mechanisms for collecting the penalties. To make matters worse, those responsible for this illegal activity were found camping inside a traditional threshing circle, which is also catalogued as a protected ethnographic asset.
The practitioners of this recently popularised sport, which has proliferated in ravines across the archipelago often in a furtive manner, claimed to be unaware of the site’s significance. They were mostly from mainland Spain and other parts of Europe, and there was no signage, information boards, or protective measures to alert them to the presence of these heritage assets.
Furthermore, the group censures the apparent contradiction between the island government’s imposition of the controversial ‘forest cent’ tax and the effective reduction of the budget for the Environmental Department, with specific cuts to key environmental sector programmes. This calls into question the real priority of these policies compared to other investments.
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