Modernity has arrived at the Port of La Luz with the weight of concrete and the cold aroma of exclusion. While the multinational Global Ports rolled out its red carpet to inaugurate the largest cruise terminal in the Eurozone, the local protocol executed a silent purge: the ban on Oneport. The Canary partner of the Turkish firm and president of the employers’ association Fedeport, in a gesture that attending authorities deemed ‘in poor taste’, decided that 14,000 square meters were not enough to accommodate those who do not orbit under the umbrella of the Regime of 78.
By denying the invitation to his colleague from Oneport, José Mayor, the inauguration of the largest cruise infrastructure in Europe began with an invisible yet insurmountable boundary. The reason is not operational but purely ideological: an atavistic fear of granting legitimacy to an employers’ group that resists gravitating in the docile orbit of the Regime of 78.
Troupe
Amid the murmur of the authorities and the salty wind battering the new structure, a consultant from an international firm, dispatched from London to supervise the asset entry of Global Ports, observed the scene with a mix of boredom and anthropological disdain. When asked about the absence of the employers’ association Oneport, his response was a laconic exercise in dirty realism: ‘In mature markets, competition is managed efficiently; in the terminal provinces of the West, it is still managed with genealogical trees and party cards. It is fascinating to see how a 40 million euro investment can be held hostage by the resentment of a parish office’.
Fedeport’s ban was nothing more than a folkloric residue of a world that refuses to die, an anomaly in a flow of capital that, in theory, should have no feelings or memory. Turkish capital did not come to Las Palmas to participate in the disputes of the Regime of 78; it came to extract profitability from the inertia of European tourism. José Mayor’s exclusion was the ultimate proof that, despite its cutting-edge infrastructure and state-of-the-art fingers, the Canary Islands continue to operate under a logic of chieftainship that modernity in Istanbul simply tolerates as long as the numbers add up.
Not even at Lepanto
In the end, when the authorities retreated in their official cars, only concrete remained. The largest cruise terminal in Europe stood solitary, a monument to the scientific management of the human mass, guarded by a local elite that prefers to reign over an exclusive lot than to thrive in an open port. The success of the day was total in financial terms, but absolute in its moral misery. Las Palmas now has a magnificent door to the Atlantic, but its keys remain in the hands of those who fear, above all, that someone outside their circle dares to cross the threshold.
Lack of Grandeur
There is a melancholic irony in this Turkish landing. For centuries, the West and the Ottoman Empire measured themselves in the waters of Lepanto and before the walls of Vienna in a duel of absolute wills. Today, the conflict is no longer settled with janissaries, but with terms and concessions stretching fifty years. Turkey no longer needs to lay siege to Europe; it is enough to buy its entryways while local employers amuse themselves with small purges of etiquette. While the continent sinks into bureaucratic paralysis and existential fatigue, Anatolian dynamism occupies the spaces that the old Christendom, now turned into a theme park for retirees, is incapable of managing with dignity.
Beatriz Calzada, president of the Port Authority, proudly celebrated what she defined as a technological benchmark, mentioning the new fingers that draw the cruiser into the comfort of the interior. It is the aseptic embrace of a new order: a port that no longer looks to the interior of the island but towards the spreadsheets of Istanbul. Cruise ships, they say, generate economy and jobs, connecting with a business fabric that, however, was shown to be broken by the exclusion of Oneport. In the end, after the 40 million invested and the customary toasts, only a perfect structure for the end of history remains: an endless dock where Turkish capital and the decadence of local institutions merge in a concrete, dividends, and a complete absence of grandeur.
