Italy to open its first official consulate in the Canary Islands in Arona

Arona will be the seat of Italy's first official consulate in the Canary Islands. Starting in February 2021, new offices will begin serving in the Zentral Center building in Playa de Las Americas, according to the forecast run by the embassy. Until now, the transalpine country had two honorary consulates in each province. Italy's ambassador to Spain, Ricardo Guariglia, and the consul in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Silvio Pelizzolo, signed the lease agreement for future facilities yesterday and met with the mayor of Arona, José Julián Mena, and the Councilor for Institutional Relations, Alberto Delgado at the Cultural Center of Los Cristianos. The office, which already has the necessary permits from the Spanish and Italian authorities, will allow to serve both the large community of Italian nationality and the large volume of tourists visiting the island. It should be remembered that in Arona alone the number of Italian residents exceeds 11,500, according to the data of the last municipal standard, an amount that represents a quarter of the foreign inhabitants and 12% of the total population of the southern municipality. The Italian colony in Arona adds a population greater than 13 municipalities of Tenerife. Unofficially it is assumed that the number of residents of this nationality in the South is around 25,000 inhabitants (in Adeje there are 6,500 censuses), a figure to which tourists who choose the island for their holidays must be added and that in the case of last year there were 440,000, as reported by the consulate. "You only have to walk around Los Cristianos for a while or have a drink in any café to check that the most talked about language is Italian," several traders from this seaside resort told this newspaper. Silvio Pelizzolo told this newspaper last night that the new units will help to pay better attention to Italian citizens, as the volume of administrative work has continued to grow in recent years. In this sense, the honorary consul cited among the most frequent formalities the application for passport and identity cards, in addition to certificates by birth, marriage and death.