Lawyer, politician and writer · 1881-1940
Lawyer, politician and writer
Ramón Gil-Roldán y Martín was a lawyer, politician, journalist and writer born in Santa Cruz de Tenerife on 28 February 1881. He died in the same city in 1940. A republican and advocate of autonomy, he took part in debates on the political organisation of the Canary Islands and also left poetry linked to Canarian regionalism.
Gil-Roldán completed secondary school in Santa Cruz de Tenerife and earned his law degree at the University of Seville in 1906. He practised as a lawyer, was a primary-school teacher and became professor of Roman Law and History of Law at the University of La Laguna. His journalistic and literary activity developed alongside these public and teaching responsibilities.
His republican and autonomist ideas were expressed in his defence of the 1912 Law of Island Councils and, during the Second Republic, in projects for the regional organisation of the Canary Islands. Educational publications of the Government of the Canary Islands state that, from the Tenerife provincial commonwealth, he drafted a regional statute project in 1931. He chaired the Santa Cruz de Tenerife Port Works Board from 1931 to 1933 and served as a member of parliament for the Partido Republicano Tinerfeño.
As a writer, he authored El crimen de Arguayo and the poem La tierra y la raza. The Government of the Canary Islands' literature curriculum includes him among regionalist poets and highlights the sections El Mencey loco and Ofrenda. In 1915 he wrote the lyrics of the Himno a Canarias, with music by Camilo Pérez Monllor, premiered at the Municipal Theatre in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Recent attention by the Instituto de Estudios Canarios to a monographic biography confirms the historical interest of his career.
