From Barranquilla to Yaiza: one family marks twenty-five years of marriage and of island life at once

Some anniversaries are celebrated by two people. This one is celebrated by three, and the third is an island.

Alex Salebe and Bibiana arrived in Yaiza from Barranquilla, Colombia, in 2001, newly married. Two years later Mateo was born, a Lanzarote islander by birth. This year the two dates fall together: twenty-five years of marriage and twenty-five years on the island. Father and son have told the story jointly — Mateo from Madrid, where he studies, Alex from here.

What you leave behind

"Even when it is a choice," they write, "leaving your country is always hard": it means leaving parents, brothers and sisters, the rest of the family. Mateo, who did not witness that moment, says he has had it before him all his life, in the example at home. It is what families from countless countries are doing today, and what Lanzarote sees daily without often hearing it told from the inside.

The grandfather's line

One line is worth the whole column. Mateo says he writes as an apprentice, and his father reminds him what grandfather Alfonso used to tell him: "We never stop being apprentices."

It is a story of Canarian hospitality told by those who received it, and for once it is not about politics: it thanks a town. On an island where half the conversations about immigration end in shouting, a family marking twenty-five years of life here is the kind of news worth as much as an investment.