TEDxLa Laguna

Speakers

Speakers may not be confirmed. Check the event website for the latest lineup.

• Aarón Gómez

  Comedian, actor, scriptwriter and presenter

  Aarón Gómez has spent more than twenty years making the Canary Islands laugh. Born in Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 1981, he began his career as director and scriptwriter of the comedy group Teatro13, with which he won several awards at the El Sauzal Festival, including Best Actor and Best Play. His career spans theatre, film, television and digital formats. He has appeared in productions such as Hierro, Odio el verano and Descarrilados, and starred in the short film Como yo te amo, directed by Fernando García-Ruiz and nominated for the Goya Awards. On television, he has worked with Amazon Prime and Playz, and currently directs and presents Una Mala Noche la tiene cualquiera on Televisión Canaria, where he blends humour, interviews and reflection with a style all his own. In October he premieres his new show Gracias as part of the Reíslas Festival. His humour blends Canarian everyday life, improvisation and social commentary.

• Amanda Negrín

  Entrepreneur and freediver

  Amanda Negrín discovered freediving in the middle of the pandemic, while practising yoga at home. She gave it a go out of curiosity, reached 15 metres on her very first attempt… and never looked back. In just a few years she went from that first dive to descending to 58 metres, holding her breath for 4 minutes and training with some of the best freedivers in the world in Radazul, Tenerife. When she's not in the sea, she's at the helm of Cafetería Los Majuelos, a family business she has turned into a benchmark in Tenerife: best sandwich in the Canary Islands and third best in Spain. Winner of the "Woman of Today" award from CIT Nordeste, Amanda represents those who take on a legacy with respect and carry it further than anyone imagined. Two seemingly different worlds that share the same philosophy: doing things with passion, without limits and with complete authenticity.

• David Meca

  Former long-distance swimmer and speaker

  David Meca is regarded by the International Swimming Federation as the greatest long-distance swimmer of all time. A twenty-eight-time world champion with more than a hundred international titles, he is the first and only person to win four medals at a single Long-Distance Swimming World Championship. His career is built on challenges that seemed impossible: he swam 130 kilometres non-stop from mainland Spain to Ibiza, crossed the English Channel twice, broke the record for the Strait of Gibraltar and completed the legendary "Alcatraz escape" by swimming. In the Canary Islands he left behind two unforgettable feats: in 2001 he swam from La Gomera to Tenerife in eight hours, with thousands of people waiting for him on the shore at Los Cristianos, and a year later he spent almost twenty-four hours in the water swimming from Tenerife to Gran Canaria.

• Elena Pérez & María Hernández-Alcalá

  Biochemists and nutrition experts

  Elena Pérez and María Hernández-Alcalá, mother and daughter, have turned healthy eating into a way of life. Founders of FuturLife21 since 2016, they launched the project with one purpose: to teach people how to eat in a balanced way, combining scientific rigour with a warm, practical and dogma-free approach. With more than 845,000 followers on Instagram, they have built one of the strongest health and wellness communities in the Spanish-speaking world. They are regular speakers at major companies such as Ernst & Young, Deloitte and KPMG, and the authors of a collection of recipe books that have connected with thousands of people looking to eat well without giving up pleasure. Their message is as simple as it is transformative: eating healthily is neither a trend nor a sacrifice. It is a decision that changes lives.

• Héctor Socas

  Astrophysicist and researcher

  Héctor Socas was born in Icod de los Vinos and earned his doctorate at the University of La Laguna in 1999, with a thesis awarded by the Spanish Astronomical Society. After almost a decade in the United States, at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, he has worked on developing instrumentation for major telescopes and on space missions for JAXA and NASA. A researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, he is currently director of the European Solar Telescope Foundation, the largest solar telescope in Europe. His proposal of the "Clarke exobelt", a technomarker for detecting intelligent extraterrestrial civilisations, earned him an invitation to the NASA Technosignatures meeting, where NASA gathered the world's leading experts in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence to advise on how to revive this line of research after three decades away from it.

• Idaira Fernández

  Singer and performing artist

  In 2005, a young woman from La Laguna entered the Operación Triunfo Academy and became the public's favourite. Week after week, Spain voted for her. She reached the final as the most nominated contestant of her series — and the most loved by those following from home. But Idaira Fernández's story goes far beyond a television programme. Since then she has built a long career with no shortcuts: starring in musicals such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and El Médico, performing in concerts, and forging an artistic path that has reinvented itself at every stage. Today, in her new chapter as a mother, she combines art with personal experience, offering an honest look at the challenges of growing, creating and caring with sensitivity.

• Meritxell Falgueras

  Sommelier, communicator and writer

  Meritxell Falgueras was born among bottles — literally. She is the fifth generation of Celler de Gelida, one of Barcelona's oldest wine shops, and grew up in a world where wine was family before it was profession. At just 20 she became the youngest sommelier in Spain, and at 25 she won the Nariz de Oro (Golden Nose) Award. Trained in England, France, Italy and the United States, she has spent two decades building a career that goes far beyond the glass. Author of five books, a regular contributor to outlets such as La Vanguardia, ELLE Gourmet and RNE, and a teacher on official sommelier courses, Meritxell has turned wine into a language for talking about culture, identity and feminism. Founder of the Mujeres del Vino (Women of Wine) movement, she has spent years calling out the sector's structural sexism with humour, rigour and a disarming irony. Her motto says it all: to talk about wine almost without talking about wine.

• Sara Socas

  Rapper, singer, songwriter and journalist

  Sara Socas was born in Tegueste, Tenerife, and studied a double degree in Journalism and Audiovisual Communication at the Carlos III University of Madrid while becoming one of the most influential voices in Spanish-language freestyle rap. She was the first woman to join the FMS, the most important freestyle league in the Spanish-speaking world, earning her place by working her way up through the competitive circuit. In 2023 she left the world of competition to focus on her musical career and released her first album, TFN-MAD, with influences ranging from rap and trap to bachata and r&b, touring more than 80 concerts across Spain. A regular contributor to La Ventana on Cadena SER and an editor at Los 40, she has also run rap workshops in secondary schools across the Madrid region with young people at risk of social exclusion.

• Sergio Rodríguez

  Farmer

  In 2021, Sergio Rodríguez posted a video asking for help to sell 8,000 kilos of watermelon. Within 48 hours, he had sold them all. What seemed like a one-off problem became the starting point for something far bigger: proof that the Canary Islands want their own produce, and that all it took was making it easy. A farmer from Tejina (La Laguna), Nito has built a community of more than 500,000 followers, speaking without filters about what really happens in the Canarian countryside. Not from a place of complaint, but of action: bringing local produce closer to people, raising awareness about what we consume and championing a farming sector with a future. In October 2025 he opened El Mercado de Nito, his most ambitious project to date. A flagship space for local produce and the circular economy in the north-east of Tenerife, and one more step in a story that began in a family vegetable garden and has no intention of stopping.

• Seve Díaz

  Chef

  Seve Díaz was born in Punta Brava, Puerto de la Cruz, and learned to cook the same way he learned music: through intuition, obsession and hours of practice. Self-taught both in the kitchen and on stage, he spent years playing the guitar professionally before cooking changed his course. With no haute cuisine schools or manuals to follow, he turned his way of looking at the Canarian landscape into a language of his own. So El Taller was born, a space for creation where the Canary Islands converse with the world through memory, produce and emotion. Today it is the only Michelin-starred restaurant in the north of Tenerife — though inside they still defend the same idea as always: the most important star is still the customer. His story speaks of the value of getting it wrong, of changing direction when no one expects it, and of building your own identity in a world full of formulas.