San Bartolome honours biologist Domingo Concepcion at the municipal theatre

San Bartolome's municipal theatre hosted a memorial on Saturday 22 August for Domingo Concepcion Garcia, a biologist, teacher, researcher and science communicator who died in May 2025. The date was chosen deliberately: it was the day he would have celebrated his birthday. Family, friends, institutional representatives and former students filled the hall for a session devoted to his life, his commitment to conservation and his decades of public outreach work.

The tribute was promoted by the organising committee, with the collaboration of the town councils of San Bartolome and Tias and of the Cabildo de Lanzarote and La Graciosa. The mayor of San Bartolome, Isidro Perez, stressed his local roots: "Domingo was a biologist, a teacher, a researcher, a communicator and a firm defender of our heritage, but before all of that he was a man of San Bartolome." He added that "the best way to honour him is to keep defending what he defended: environmental education and a Lanzarote able to move forward without losing what makes it unique."

Born in San Bartolome on 22 August 1959, Concepcion graduated in Biology from the University of La Laguna in 1984. He spent much of his career at the Escuela Universitaria de Turismo de Lanzarote, combining teaching with research on agriculture, flora, protected areas and hiking routes.

One of his main lines of work was the study of the birdlife of Lanzarote and the Chinijo Archipelago, which produced a substantial body of documentation. His defence of the island also took an activist form: he chaired the Asociacion Cultural y Ecologista El Guincho between 1998 and 2002 and was a member of the Spanish Ornithological Society from 1992. In 2016 he received the Premio Referente de la Biosfera.

A legacy you can read in the landscape

Concepcion's research is not confined to archives. It concerns the arid plains of the island's interior, the sandy jable, the coastal wetlands and above all the Chinijo Archipelago, all of them breeding and resting grounds for species that react badly to disturbance. Staying on marked trails, keeping vehicles off the open ground, walking dogs on a lead inside protected areas and watching birds from a distance are small habits that matter most in the busiest months. They are also the most direct way of continuing the environmental education the mayor described as the real inheritance to be taken up.