Festival Campesino stages "El poema diario de Titerroygatra" on Saturday

The Festival Campesino added another chapter to its long history on Saturday night with the show El poema diario de Titerroygatra. The staging braided together the lives of people who shaped Lanzarote's emotional and poetic imagination with the saranda dance, traditional music and sepia scenes of an island that once moved to the rhythm of tides and seasons.

The evening opened with an audiovisual piece built from images provided by Memoria Digital de Lanzarote, together with words from Benito Cabrera, a long-standing collaborator of Los Campesinos. The prologue set the tone for what followed: performances and dances of some of the group's best-known pieces, alongside others of more recent composition.

Running through the show was the memory of figures from the island's history, among them Josefina Pla, Félix Hormiga, Agustín Espinosa, César Manrique and Inocencia Páez. Rather than a straightforward concert, the result worked as a route through oral memory, literature and landscape.

Los Campesinos left the stage to a standing audience, making way for the second half of the Festival, the slot reserved each year for guests from the roots-music scene. This time it went to Los Cantadores, on their 18th anniversary tour and joined by the distinctive voice of Tamara.

Why traditional music matters here

On Lanzarote, folk music is less a tourist attraction than a working archive. Decades of emigration and rapid change to the landscape left the island relying on songs, oral accounts and family photographs to hold its story together. The show's title borrows Titerroygatra, the name given to the island by its pre-Hispanic inhabitants, which signals the intention clearly enough. Visitors curious about the names heard on stage will find much of the same material in the collections of Memoria Digital de Lanzarote.