Lawyer and politician from Gran Canaria, first president of the Government of the Canary Islands after autonomy in 1982. He fought for Canarian rights.
José Miguel Galván Bello was born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in 1904. A lawyer by profession, he espoused republican and autonomist ideas from his youth. During the Second Republic he was an active defender of Canarian interests in Parliament. The Francoist dictatorship cut off his political activity for decades, but with the arrival of the democratic Transition, Galván Bello emerged as one of the most respected figures in the archipelago for his steadfastness and integrity.
He was elected senator for Gran Canaria in the first democratic elections of 1977 and actively participated in the negotiation of the Statute of Autonomy of the Canary Islands, approved in 1982. That same year he was elected the first President of the Government of the Canary Islands, a post he held until 1983. His presidency was brief but symbolic: it represented the culmination of decades of struggle for recognition of the archipelago's differential identity within the Spanish state.
He was recognised with the Gold Medal of the Canary Islands and other institutional honours. He died in 1993, aged eighty-nine, having witnessed the consolidation of the autonomous regime he helped build. His name is synonymous with the first generation of Canarian democrats who made autonomy possible, and his figure is honoured at institutional events of the Government of the Canary Islands.