Ángel Olmo Quesada, awarded by the Benidorm Neighborhood Council as Exemplary Neighbor 2024

Ángel Olmo Quesada was appointed this Tuesday as the Exemplary Benidorm Neighbour of the year 2024. This was agreed by the jury selected by the Neighbourhood Council to award this award, which the Benidorm City Council awards each year to people “who have outstanding and notable personal, civic and ethical values” that can serve as a reference and inspiration for other citizens. The mayor of the city, Toni Pérez, together with the councillor for Citizen Participation, Ana Pellicer, have received the representatives of the jury to find out the name of the person awarded and to convey this decision to the winner himself, whom the mayor has congratulated on behalf of the entire municipal corporation through a telephone call.

The mayor has also congratulated the jury for its choice, highlighting that the winner has “many values ​​of solidarity and dedication to others that, without a doubt, make him worthy of public recognition from his neighbours”. The award ceremony will take place at an event open to all citizens next Thursday, October 31, at 1:00 p.m., in the plenary hall of Benidorm City Hall.

Ángel Olmo's candidacy as Exemplary Neighbor of 2024 has been endorsed by two entities with a recognized track record in Benidorm: the Brotherhood of the Santísimo Cristo del Perdón y de la Buena Muerte and the Societat Musical La Nova de Benidorm, entities of which he is a member and to which he has dedicated a good part of his life. Of these, the jury has considered Ángel Olmo's contribution to the teaching dozens of generations of Benidorm residents as a teacher, to local culture and civil society, as well as his humanitarian side.

Born in Las Ventas del Carrizal (Jaén), on February 3, 1948, he is married and is the father of two children and grandfather of three grandchildren. He studied teaching and, after teaching at various schools in his native Jaén and the province of Alicante, such as Guardamar de Segura and Petrer, in 1975 he left the world of teaching and moved to Benidorm to work at Banco Alicantino de Comercio, where he was director for three years.

Later, in 1981, he passed the teacher's exams and the first school where he worked with his place was the CEIP Bautista Lledó, forming part of the management team. This was followed by the CEIP Ausiàs March, Mestre Gaspar López and Serra Gelada, a centre that he helped to set up. During the years of greatest enrollment, he also collaborated with the Benidorm City Council, in the Education Department, as a coordinator for all new families arriving in Benidorm. In 1997 he was appointed director of the new Els Tolls school, the largest public centre in the city, where he taught and directed until his retirement in 2008.

Likewise, since he arrived in Benidorm, Ángel Olmo Quesada has been part of different cultural and social groups. For more than 20 years he was a member of the board of directors of the Benidorm Musical Union, under the presidency of Jaume Antón. After the foundation of the Societat Musical La Nova in 2021, he has also been a member of its board, as treasurer and vice president. He has also been part of the Comissió de Festes Majors Patronals as a member on different occasions; a member of the Comissió de Sant Antoni in 2008 and a member of Con Sal Club for more than two decades.

In addition, he has been a member of the Cofradía del Cristo del Perdón y de la Buena Muerte since 2014 and a regular collaborator of Cáritas in the parish of the Virgen de la Almudena, where he voluntarily and altruistically carries out active work caring for vulnerable people and participates in the distribution of food to people at risk of exclusion.

"In the opinion of the Neighbourhood Council, all these circumstances demonstrate his human and social quality and have made Ángel Olmo Quesada worthy of the award as Exemplary Neighbour of 2024", beating the other finalist candidates, as highlighted by the mayor, who in addition to congratulating the award winner this Thursday has forwarded this decision to the board of spokespersons for the entire Corporation to be aware of.

For her part, the Councillor for Citizenship Participation has reported that the jury in charge of selecting the award winner has been made up of people who have won awards in previous years and independent people and people unrelated to the candidacies, all of them selected by the Neighbourhood Council. Pellicer also indicated that those responsible for announcing the name of the award winner to the mayor were Eusebi Chiner Vives and Bárbara Pérez Llinares, winners in 2017 and 2023, respectively, as well as Teresa Garrido, responsible for this award within the Neighborhood Council together with two other representatives of the jury.

Since this civic award was launched, the Exemplary Neighbour Award has recognised the career and values ​​of Benidorm residents such as Francisco Fenoll Rostoll (2011), Antonio Gonzaga Pico (2012), Francisco Alvado Barber (2013), Carmen Cerda Garrido (2014), Maria Rosa Gonzalez Mata-Rubio and Juan Jose Garcia Albarran (posthumously in 2015), Casimiro Vila Esteban (2016), Eusebi Chiner Vives (2017), Maria Zaragoza Lloret (2018), Jesus Rosillo Jimenez (2019) and Barbara Perez Llinares -María del Sufragio-, awarded in the 2023 edition.