MADRID (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 15th June, 2020) Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau believes the city's iconic monument to Christopher Columbus should not be removed but instead contextualized as discussions of statues to controversial figures sweep the world.
The mayor was speaking as a guest at the RAC-1 radio station in response to a regional parliamentary proposal, forwarded by an En Comu Podum coalition member, to remove the statue.
"The Columbus Monument - it is part of the memory of the city of Barcelona. All the experts in the field of democratic memory that we have consulted find it more interesting to leave the statue as criticism and for an explanation," Colau said in a radio broadcast.
Christopher Columbus statues have become the center of the wave of anti-racism sentiment that has gripped many countries after the killing of African-American George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police last month. Protesters and Black Lives Matter movement supporters have torn down or defaced statues to slave owners, confederate figures, colonialists and others.
Initially revered as an intrepid explorer, Columbus has become, in the popular consciousness, a harbinger of the genocide against indigenous people and the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
The statue to the Italian explorer sits atop a 60-meter tall obelisk that is adorned with religious and historical symbolism. Columbus points to the West. The monument, just outside the city's port, serves as a focal point in the city.
