The carnival of Santa Cruz de Tenerife needs a permanent exhibition site for tourists and anyone who wants to enjoy this traditional show throughout the year.

After the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, Santa Cruz de Tenerife has the most popular and renown carnival throughout the world. What is more, in January 18th, 1980, the event was declared Celebration of International Tourist Interest by Spanish Ministry of Tourism.

This is not the only Canary celebration that holds this distinction. However, after February, the month in which the Carnival is held (although some acts may fall in January or March), the party finishes in Santa Cruz and the authorities do not take advantage of the interest that visitors show in this event.
Sergio Garcia, director of ‘Gala de la Reina’, talked about this matter with knowledge of the facts. For four years, about fifteen years ago, he was the director of ‘Carnavalverano’, a show organized the Council of Tenerife in Puerto de la Cruz that was covered by the international media.

“The council used to promote the celebration of the carnival in the entire island with a grand gala that even included a Queen of the Carnival contest. These carnivals used to be a success.

What Sergio Garcia is now proposing goes beyond holding the carnival during summer season. “This is about having a site or premises in Santa Cruz where every Saturday, for example, tourists can enjoy a great spectacle of carnival, something like Tropicana in Cuba”, explains this well known artist. He added that the Carnival exhibition could be located at the bullring which is nowadays completely abandoned.

“This building could be remodelled to become the permanent venue for the Carnival. It has to be studied whether it would be economically viable and the project would need to count with sponsors to make it a reality”, ended García.

http://www.laopinion.es/tenerife/2010/11/05/carnaval-turistas/312818.html

The island will host between the 21^st and the 26^th of March, 2011, this international event that will bring the public closer to the multiple dimensions related to the study of the stars.

‘Discover the cosmos and change the world’ are two of the premises of the Starmus Festival that will take place in Tenerife Island between the 21^st and the 26^th of March, 2011. This international event will turn the island in the epicentre of astronomy and space science. The festival counts with the support of the Canary Astrophysics Institute (IAC) and it has as main goal to bring closer to the people the different dimensions in the study of the stars combining science with art and music.

Attendees will learn more about extraterrestrial life and the future of the space race by the hand of prominent researchers in this field, including several Nobel winners and key personalities in the history of space as the astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Valentina Tereshkova.

The participants will also take a look at the artistic side of astronomy, astrophotography and space through art exhibitions and the music of Tangerine Dream which will be working for the first time with the actual sounds emitted by celestial bodies.

The idea for this festival was developed by the researcher from the IAC Garik Israelian. The Starmus Festival will also honor the figure of Yuri Gagarin on the 50th anniversary of his achievement. The flight of the spacecraft Vostok 1 will be remembered by his fellows Tereshkova, the first woman cosmonaut, and Alexei Leonov, the first man to perform a spacewalk.

The festival will count with the presence of other personalities such as the former NASA astronaut Aldrin, who shared a moonwalk with Neil Armstrong in 1969, and his partner Bill Anders, who immortalized on board the Apollo 8 one of the iconic images of the twentieth century: the Earthrise photograph, which shows Earth rising above the Moon.

The organizers will not only offer the living memory of those days, but also documentary samples Soviet secret archives. The tribute to Gagarin will be one of the main activities of the Starmus Festival with the lecture series’ Discover the cosmos and change the world.

For three days, prominent researchers will address issues ranging from the classic question of whether extraterrestrial life exists to global warming or the analysis of the relationship between religion and exobiology.

This tour through the great themes of astronomy includes lessons about black holes delivered by the scientist Kip Thorne Caltech, or a lecture on exoplanets delivered by its discoverer Michel Mayor, who is a researcher at the University of Geneva.

The series also includes papers of the president of the International Astronomical Union, Robert Williams, the Nobel Prize in Physics 2009, George Smith, and the musician and astrophysicist Brian May, who will be setting out the question ¿what are we doing in space?

http://www.que.es/santa-cruz-de-tenerife/201011021112-festival-starmus-convertira-isla-tenerife-epi.html