Arrecife publishes Agustin de la Hoz's unseen notebook on the speech of Lanzarote

Monday 31 August marks one hundred years since the birth of Agustin de la Hoz, the writer and historian born in Arrecife in 1926 and who died in 1988. To mark the anniversary the town hall of Arrecife is reissuing several of his works, and the most unusual of them is now out: the Cuaderno de habla popular de Lanzarote, previously unpublished and co-written with his wife, the schoolteacher Pilar Perdomo Fajardo.

The couple began the project in 1969 in order to preserve the island's endemic forms of expression, but it was never pulled together for publication. What survived was a set of notebooks filled with handwritten notes on topics, individual words and drafts still waiting to be cross-checked. That material has now been given final shape thanks to the town hall and to the work of the executor of the estate and director of the Municipal Archive, Benchomo Guadalupe Oliva.

The book gathers terms and expressions from the island's popular heritage, with words collected both in Arrecife and in the other villages of Lanzarote: some tied to seafaring, others to the farming interior. It also includes proverbs and turns of phrase from earlier generations.

Mayor Yonathan de Leon announced the publication on 25 August, the feast of San Gines, timing it with the Sangineles celebrations and the centenary. Over the following weekend he encouraged families attending the opening of the new public terrace at the Parque Tematico to read it. The book is to be distributed across the Canary Islands. De Leon stresses the importance for Arrecife of promoting the literary work of De la Hoz, whose name the capital's Casa de la Cultura carries.

Why island vocabulary is worth a closer look

Spanish as spoken in Lanzarote carries a vocabulary of its own that general dictionaries rarely record: names of fish, farming tools, winds, and set phrases for reading the weather. A compilation built from notes taken directly in the villages is a practical way to see which of those words are still in circulation and which have faded. In Arrecife, the Casa de la Cultura Agustin de la Hoz and the Municipal Archive are the two places connected to the author and his papers.