This eighth edition will be held on Saturday, January 13, and will have 84 points in Mallorca: this is a 6% more participation than last year
New edition of the Encendida de Torres, Atalayas y Talayots del Mediterráneo por los Derechos Humanos
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The Consell de Mallorca organizes a new edition of the Encendida de Torres, Atalayas y Talayots del Mediterráneo por los Derechos Humanos, together with the Fondo Mallorquín de Cooperación, the IES Marratxí and Amnesty International. This eighth edition will be held on Saturday, January 13, and will have 84 points in Mallorca: this is 6% more participation than last year.
In addition to Mallorca, there will also be lighted towers in the rest of the Balearic Islands, in other parts of Spain, such as Catalonia, Aragon, Valencia, Murcia and Andalusia, and other countries on the Mediterranean shore, such as Morocco, Lebanon, Tunisia, Italy and France have also been invited through their local partners.
The event will occur two times on Saturday, January 13, 2024: at 1:00 pm and 6:30 pm. The 84 points will become light simultaneously and recreate the visual communication between the watchtowers, which were essentially a self-defence resource and which, with this action, become beacons of welcome showing the way of arrival. This year the Catalan writer Josep Vallverdú i Aixalà will be responsible for reading the manifesto.
The aim of the Encesa is twofold: on the one hand, to raise awareness of the situation in the Mediterranean, where many people are forced to leave their homes and lose their lives every year, and, on the other hand, to claim and assert the towers, watchtowers, talayots and fortifications as historical and cultural heritage present in all the territories of the Mediterranean.
The initiative arose in Mallorca in 2016 as an initiative of a group of teachers from the Marratxí Secondary School and the Balearic Mathematics Society SBM-XEIX who acted to make possible again the visual connection between the towers on the occasion of the commemoration of the IV centenary of the death of Juan Bautista Binimelis, mathematician and author of the system of fire and smoke signals that was used since the seventeenth century.
During the last few years, the initiative has grown and expanded among the islands of Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera and other territories such as Catalonia, Aragon, Valencia, Andalusia and countries in North Africa and the Middle East. This growth has been possible thanks to the participation of different sectors of citizenship, municipalities, private companies, civil society organizations and academia.