Nothing better defines the fatigue of a civilization than the BOP of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The board of directors has decided that the pilotage service at the port of Los Cristianos—that act of guiding ships toward the immobility of the quay—will now cost 1.52% more. It is a technical figure, devoid of passion, an inflationary adjustment that will scarcely be enough to pay for the coffees of the managers who signed it.
The president, Pedro Suárez López de Vergara, and the secretary, Rosario Arteaga, have affixed their digital signatures to a document regulating the friction of ship hulls against Canary concrete. The Fixed Service Fee has been set at €188.77, while the Variable Fee per GT dissolves into a string of decimals: €0.0108341. It is the precision of the accountant attempting to impose meaning on a world that has renounced any purpose other than administrative continuity.
At the Port of Los Cristianos, where tourists wait for ferries to take them to even more isolated islands, pilotage is the last vestige of a physical skill that has been absorbed by the technical specifications. The pilot—the man who boards a vessel to avert disaster—is today merely a concept within an “ordinary amendment.”
Suspension of the availability charge
The second point of the resolution is striking: the suspension of the availability charge for the 2026 fiscal year. It is a postponement of reality, a temporary pothole of gratuity in a system that otherwise charges us for the mere fact of existing. It will be reassessed in 2027, as if the future were a place that will actually happen, rather than simply a repetition of the present with updated tariffs.
Meanwhile, in Las Palmas, the Laskaridis brothers’ shipyards continue to process the metal and grease that ensure these vessels still require pilots. There is an invisible coherence between the port’s announcement and the neon lights of casinos in Greece: the management of flows. Some manage the flow of cocaine, others that of ships, and others that of chance. All, however, ultimately bow to the same structure of bureaucratic power that turns a 1.52% increase into the only piece of news capable of cutting through the torpor of a November afternoon.
