Gazmira

Gazmira is a figure who lives on the boundary between history and legend. Daughter of the last Benahorite king of Aceró — Tanausú — she lived in the heart of the Caldera de Taburiente, the imposing volcanic crater that the people of La Palma regarded as their sacred land. The Benahorites, as the pre-Hispanic inhabitants of La Palma called themselves, were distributed across twelve cantons, with Aceró the most inaccessible of all.

According to the chronicles of the conquest and the oral tradition of La Palma, Gazmira stood beside her father during the final resistance. When Alonso Fernández de Lugo invaded La Palma in 1492, most cantons fell one by one. Only Aceró, protected by the sheer cliffs of the Caldera, held out. Legend has it that Gazmira fought alongside the men, and that she was one of the last faces of Benahorite freedom.

After Tanausú's capture by treachery and his death at sea, nothing is known of Gazmira's fate. She was most likely enslaved or absorbed into the new colonial order, as happened to most survivors. Her figure symbolises female resistance in an era when indigenous women rarely appear in the historical record.