The Cabildo Games bring together more than 10,000 young people in 31 sports

The 37th Cabildo de Tenerife Games, organized by the Sports Department, have brought the season to a close, coinciding with the end of the school year. This year’s event brought together 10,136 children and teenagers between the ages of 6 and 17 across a total of 31 sports, according to Sports Councilor Yolanda Moliné.

In this 37th edition, it is worth noting that female participation (52.78%) has surpassed male participation (47.22%) for the first time.

The season concluded with a total of 198 days of activity across all sports, with 42,592 participants (21,705 girls and 20,887 boys) at the dozens of sports facilities, most of which are municipally owned, spread throughout the island.

Yolanda Moliné notes that the sports featured in this edition were aquathlon, chess, track and field, badminton, basketball, handball, beach handball, baseball, cross-country, road cycling, mountain biking, and BMX cycling, frontenis, indoor soccer, rhythmic gymnastics, judo, Canarian wrestling, swimming, artistic swimming, orienteering, figure skating, freestyle skating, rugby, lifesaving, surfing, taekwondo, table tennis, volleyball, beach volleyball, sailing, and water polo.

Over the course of nearly four decades, the Cabildo Games have established themselves as an ideal tool for promoting grassroots sports in Tenerife. Throughout this time, the longest-running program of the Tenerife Island Council’s Sports Service has enabled several generations of boys and girls from all the island’s municipalities to experience, enjoy, and share sporting experiences—with all that this entails in terms of social interaction, camaraderie, respect, fun, solidarity, discipline, and teamwork, which are, in essence, the values the program promotes.

Finally, it is worth noting that this program could not be carried out without the essential collaboration of local governments, serving as the best example of how proper coordination among government agencies is an effective tool for social mobilization. Nor should we overlook the important role played by sports federations, clubs, and sports schools, as well as the families of young athletes, whose active participation has helped make the Cabildo Games a flagship program for promoting sports in the Canary Islands.