Benidorm awards its City Medal to the missionary Jaume Benaloy Marco from Benidorm

Benidorm City Council is going to award the city's Corporate Medal to Jaume Benaloy Marco, a Benidorm priest assigned by the Orihuela-Alicante Diocese to the Peruvian region of Chimbote to work on different missions in that region. The mayor of the city, Toni Pérez, announced this Tuesday the proposal, submitted unanimously by the Board of Spokesmen and which will be ratified at the next ordinary plenary session this November. Likewise, the first mayor has publicly conveyed his congratulations to Benaloy Marco and has highlighted that his work “perfectly exemplifies many of the principles contained in our Magna Carta, such as the duty to conserve our environment; the defense of people's quality of life or cooperation and solidarity between regions", for which he has considered that he is "worthy" of this public tribute.

Born in Benidorm in December 1974, Jaume Benaloy Marco has a doctorate in Educational Sciences from the Universidad Católica Los Ángeles de Chimbote; a Theologian specialist in interreligious dialogue from the Pontifical University

Lateran of Rome; and a diploma in Social Work from the University of Alicante, in addition to having an extensive pastoral and educational career in public and private institutions in both Spain and Peru. He was ordained as a priest of the Catholic Church in June 1999. After visiting different parishes in the province and training for a time in Rome, in June 2008 the then Bishop of the Diocese of Orihuela-Alicante, Mons. Rafael Palmero Ramos, was appointed to work in the missions of the diocese of Chimbote, a Peruvian region of about 900,000 inhabitants, located in a desert area of the South Pacific and whose main livelihood is fishing, to carry out different works of evangelization and help to those most in need. , paying special attention to its great social and environmental problems.

Last October marked 15 years since this priest from Benidorm undertook what he has described on many occasions as the “most rewarding mission of his life” and where he has been able to carry out many teaching and solidarity projects, aimed especially at improving the quality of life of the people of this district of Peru and promote its environmental regeneration. Not in vain, he currently combines his work as parish priest of the Santo Toribio parish in Chimbote and as a professor at the Los Angeles Catholic University of this same city, with his role as director of the Retirement House and vice president of the Asilo San José de Casma. Likewise, he is one of the promoters of the 'Chimbote de Pie' collective and the 'Círculo de Animadores Laudato Si' of Chimbote, which aims to recover the El Ferrol bay, which is highly contaminated.

Furthermore, his mission in that country has also been reflected here, in his native Benidorm, through the Benidorm-Chimbote Solidarity Association (ASBECH). It is a non-profit organization of volunteers, which since 2020 has been developing different collaboration and international cooperation actions to improve the living conditions of the residents of that region, in support of the work it has been carrying out since Father Jaume Benaloy Marco three decades ago.

The presentation of the City Medal and the institutional recognition and public tribute will take place on December 6, during the institutional event organized by Benidorm City Council on the occasion of Constitution Day.