A georeferenced map recovers the toponymy and enclaves of the Serra Gelada and Benidorm's bay for their preservation

More than 200 names and enclaves are concentrated in the Serra Gelada and the bay of Benidorm. All of them have been reflected in a georeferenced map prepared by Taula del Bon Profit Hydrographic Commission with the aim of "recovering the toponymy of this area and locating each of these points to ensure their preservation and avoid losing a part so important to our roots, our identity and our history”, as explained today by the Councilor for Historical and Cultural Heritage, Ana Pellicer.

The project has been coordinated by the photographer Jaume Fuster and the professors Francesc Xavier Llorca Ibi and Francisco Aracil and more than twenty informants between the ages of 70 and 92 from Benidorm, l'Alfàs del Pi, and Altea, with whom the authors have met over the last four years to “collect their knowledge about the mountains and the bay; knowledge acquired by their condition as men of the sea, by their profession as shepherds or by their love of hunting”.

Jaume Fuster, for his part, has pointed out that the project arose as a result of a photographic exhibition of the Serra Gelada after detecting that there was no official map that included all the enclaves and that correctly collected the toponymy of the area. From then on, "recovery work has been carried out" that has even made it possible to rescue and fix names already in disuse, and that "is a reflection of what has been experienced in Serra Gelada, of the history of the keepers, riflemen, of smuggling.”

In total, as he has indicated, "220 names have been collected from Serra Gelada, l'Illa, l'Illeta and underwater stones from the bay of Benidorm, which are also accompanied by GPS coordinates for their location".

The plan, of which a thousand copies have been published, has been drawn by Francisco Aracil "trying to collect the essence and peculiarity of the plans and nautical charts of the 19th century by Rafael Pardo de Figueroa", using for this a habitual typography in the last third of that century. In addition to a bibliographic list, the back of the map has an article by Francesc Xavier Llorca Ibi on the toponymy of Serra Gelada and the bay.

Both Pellicer and Fuster have pointed out that "we are talking about an intangible heritage of the first order, which is embodied in an informative, cultural and aesthetic object" that will be officially presented next Saturday, November 26, at 1:00 p.m. in the municipal center El Torrejó.