Festival goers received disappointing news last night (Thursday), as the organisers of Greenworld made an official announcement that the event due to take place as a government health experiment on the Golf Del Sur in the south of Tenerife, has been cancelled, according to their statement, due to the lack of support for the scientific study by the Ministry of Health.
Rumours began to circulate on social media that the event wasn’t going ahead as people started to question whether enough tickets had been sold or that there was ever the intention in the first place, both of which have been claimed as false by the organisers who finally confirmed the bad news at 9pm last night, less than 48 hours before the event.
The official statement from the festival organisers says:
"After a year collaborating with the University of Medicine of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC) and the Ethics Committee for Drug Research of the Hospital Universitario de Gran Canaria Dr. Negrín to obtain data that allow us to build a reactivation model for mass cultural events in the Canary Islands; finally, at 4.55pm today, October 21st 2021, the Ministry of Health of the Canary Islands Government has rejected the requested scientific research study.”
“Similar studies have been carried out successfully both in mainland Spain and in other European countries with great results. In the Canary Islands it was necessary to have information regarding the behaviour of COVID-19 in this type of celebration. For this reason, our Organization did not hesitate, not for a second, to collaborate with the committee headed by the prestigious professor in Preventive Medicine and Public Health and spokesperson for the Scientific Committee of the Canary Islands on COVID-19, Lluis Serra Majem and Dr. María Dolores Fiuza Pérez, epidemiologist at the Doctor Negrín University Hospital of Gran Canaria (HUGCDN).”
“The main objective of our organization has been to get involved and collaborate as much as possible to facilitate the reactivation of the cultural sector in the Canary Islands. However, it has not been until today, that we have been notified of the rejection of the study by the Ministry of Health, who say that as a massive event it does not comply with current legislation on the island of Tenerife. The request for the scientific study that we have officially communicated from the outset has not been taken into account.”
“We made the decision with a tremendous disappointment and with many doubts about how a ‘system’ works in which we begin to not identify ourselves and of course, to not believe in it. We do not understand how other communities have been without restrictions for weeks and running mass events with absolute normality. This situation is more contradictory when our application was submitted by a team of medical researchers for an entirely scientific purpose.”
For all these reasons, we have made the decision to adopt the following measures immediately:
- All tickets purchased via our website from Wednesday October 13th will be fully refunded without the buyers having to carry out any procedure. The refund will be made automatically.
- All tickets from the 2020 season will be refunded. Those that were purchased through our website will not require any procedure, but will be reimbursed automatically.
- For tickets that were purchased at physical points of sale, a return process will be opened. We are designing a return protocol that will be available on our website next week.
- The total amount of all reservations will be automatically returned, both those from 2020, and those acquired for October 23rd 2021.
- The money spent on antigen tests carried out in the clinics which we have agreements with, until today Thursday October 21st, the day of the announcement of the cancellation of the study, will also be refunded (Lavitest Solutions, QuirónSalud, CovidBuster Test, Hospital San Roque Universitarios).
The organisers completed their statement by adding that, provisionally, the festival is being rescheduled for December 11th 2021 on the Golf Del Sur but all tickets purchased from them before for any Greenworld event (not Lagoon Party) are to be refunded, and they will be bringing the party to Tenerife again with a ‘clean slate’.
