On May 31, the plenary session of the Burjassot City Council approved the dissolution of the Vicent Andrés Estellés Foundation, created 15 years earlier, without notifying the family, the members of the board of trustees, or the cultural association that has most intensively worked in the Valencian municipality to keep alive the memory of the poet, Ca Bassot.
Now they have signed a manifesto in which they denounce “the abandonment and lack of interest of the town hall” with Estellés, while the former municipal archivist maintains that they never let him consult the legacy of the poet who bought the City Council and that he also observes neglect with Blasco Ibáñez .
In 2013, the Burjassot City Council acquired part of Estellés’s legacy: his personal library, with which a research fund was supposed to be made. As his grandson, Vicent Anyó, lamented, “nothing has been done, it’s stopped.”
From the town hall they claimed that they have had archivists only “for a year” and that now they are working on “studying, classifying and cataloging everything”, with the aim that, “tomorrow”, anyone can consult them in the future study center dedicated to Estellés.
We spoke with Ángel López, who was the titular archivist of Burjassot for 45 years, between 1975 and 2020, until he retired, for which he says that “it is not true” that there was not a person dedicated to it in the consistory. He points out that the legacy of Estellés “has never depended on the municipal archive”, and even more: “I never had competence in that matter, nor did they consult me ??at any time”.
He explains that the funds acquired at the initiative of Compromís -when he was a governing partner of the PSOE- were deposited “in a room of the House of Culture” and “they have not left there at any time”. Therefore, he insists that “they depended on the director of the Burjassot House of Culture and the Councilor for Culture, never on the Municipal Archives.”
Ángel López, who is also secretary of the Vicente Blasco Ibáñez de Burjassot Foundation, laments the “lack of sensitivity regarding the figure of Vicent Andrés Estellés” and assures that “the PSOE is not very interested in the intense connection” that Blasco Ibáñez had. with Burjassot: there is the building that his father built in 1880, when the writer was 13 years old, and he is the protagonist of chapter VI of the novel Arroz y Tartana.
It is right next to the Town Hall, it was used as a Public Library between 1947 and 1989, later it was used as changing rooms for the Local Police and now it houses the offices of the opposition parties. “Nothing linked to Blasco’s memory,” he sighs.
The Foundation, on several occasions, has proposed that it be used as the headquarters of a Vicente Blasco Ibáñez Study Center, “just as it could be done with the legacy of Vicent Andrés Estellés”, with “unpublished materials” and coordinated with the House Museum of the Malvarrosa.
“The response was positive, at least in theory, but the truth is that today, a couple of years later, the project is still a proposal, but not a reality,” laments López. Similarly, Burjassot has been twinned with Menton – the French city where Blasco Ibáñez died – since 1998, but “after the signing of the agreement no action has ever been taken”.
For its part, the manifesto promoted by Ca Bassot and the relatives of Estellés expresses its “rejection” and denounces “the abandonment and lack of interest of the consistory” before a Foundation that “has kept it to a minimum” until it finally dissolved it in May.
For this reason, they demand the creation of a new Vicent Andrés Estellés Foundation, whose management and responsibility is shared between the Generalitat Valenciana, the Valencia Provincial Council, the Burjassot City Council, universities and the poet’s family.
They also demand that this new foundation be established in Burjassot, that a Study Center be created to organize and display the legacy of Estellés. Finally, they encourage the associative and cultural fabric so that “this year’s Estellés festivities are a vindictive clamor for the figure of the poet and the great esteem that the Valencian people professed for him.”
The manifesto is signed, in addition to Ca Bassot and the relatives of Estellés, different cultural entities such as Escola Valenciana, the Col·lectiu Ovidi Montllor, Barnasants or Òmnium Cultural; in addition to personalities from the world of culture, journalism and politics, such as Pau Alabajos, Vicent Torrent, Núria Cadenes, Gemma Pasqual, Mònica Terribas, David Fernández or the former Catalan president Quim Torra.
