Economy and Society of El Hierro

The economic history of El Hierro is above all a history of managed scarcity. Within barely 268.71 square kilometres shared among three municipalities —Valverde, Frontera and El Pinar— the smallest and westernmost island of the archipelago based its subsistence for centuries on the primary sector: livestock, dry farming and small-scale fishing. There was no sugar here, no port of call on the great Atlantic routes, no powerful institutions to attract capital. There was instead a small community that learned to apportion water, pasture and woodland with care, and that turned this strict accounting of resources into a form of culture.

Before the arrival of the Europeans, the Bimbaches formed a herding community of modest size. According to the chronicle of Fray Juan de Abreu Galindo, they lived in dry-stone enclosures where several families gathered, roofed with ferns and branches, and dressed in hides sewn with animal sinews. Their staple food was meat, milk, butter and fern roots, and they grew neither wheat nor barley. The interior of the island was flat, but the coast was extremely rugged, which hindered movement and reinforced the closed character of that society. With no cereal farming and no military craft to attend to, livestock was almost everything: food, clothing, tools and the measure of wealth.

The factor that governed everything else was water. The island has no permanent run-off and its fractured relief lets rainfall escape towards the sea, so El Hierro was historically a territory without irrigation. Antonio Macías Hernández has quantified that scarcity: in 1850 the ratio between the annual flow of surface water used for irrigation and the island's area stood at 0.01 on El Hierro, against 261.73 on Gran Canaria, 44.54 on La Gomera or 30.86 on La Palma; in other words, practically zero. That void explains the fame of the Garoé, the holy tree in the district of Tigulahe, whose leaves distilled the trade-wind fog and poured it into two large stone basins built at its foot. The town council paid a guard to protect it and to distribute its water, proof that this trickle was a strategic public good. Alongside the tree, ponds, cisterns and small domestic intakes completed a water economy of counted drops.

The conquest did not change that equation. La Gomera and El Hierro were incorporated into the seigneury in the 1440s through a pact with the indigenous chiefs, and they remained outside the great engine of Canarian colonisation: the sugar agro-industry, which demanded fertile soils, permanent irrigation and water power to drive the mills. With neither cane nor mills, the island lived off livestock and dry crops, and off a handful of goods able to travel: cheese, dried figs, goat hides and orchil, the dyer's lichen torn from the cliffs, on which the seigneury levied its share along with the other fruits of the land. Trade was scarce, and a belt of lava cliffs with open, wave-beaten roadsteads made any shipment costly and risky.

That pressure on a small territory was paid for by the woodland. Unable to irrigate, the islanders offset the meagre yield of dry farming with livestock and won pasture from the forest by fire: as early as the seventeenth century the Nisdafe plateau was cleared, until then the seat of the evergreen laurel forest, which was confined to the steep slopes of El Golfo, while the juniper woods were intensively exploited as fuel and, above all, as raw material for every kind of domestic and agricultural implement. The south-western tip was reserved for communal grazing in what came to be called the Dehesa of El Hierro. From that pastoral culture comes the El Hierro cheese, made with cow, sheep and goat milk blended together, and dishes still prepared today such as cheese broth, quesadilla and whey custard. In El Golfo and La Dehesa, vines planted on volcanic sand added to that larder a small-scale wine of markedly insular character.

The sea provided the other half of the livelihood. Small-scale fishing has been part of the culture and the life of El Hierro's villages, and its capital is La Restinga, the southern port from which the boats work the Sea of Las Calmas: inshore fishing, but also the capture of large tuna that form part of the diet of local people and visitors alike. In 2023 forty boats worked those waters with traditional gear, gathered in a single guild, that of Nuestra Señora de los Reyes, and fishing remained a significant part of the food supply alongside subsistence agriculture. The recipe book reflects that dependence: fried moray, grilled limpets, fried parrotfish, or wahoo, which between April and July is used whole in croquettes, stews and rice soups. The same waters protected by the Sea of Las Calmas Marine Reserve today sustain the diving centres that have made La Restinga famous.

The survival well into the twentieth century of a society dependent on traditional agrarian sources explains its secular demographic stagnation and its constant emigration. Islanders left for the Americas, above all for Cuba and Venezuela, and the return of many of them brought in resources, ideas and contacts that transformed local society; the Venezuelan imprint is still felt in speech, in music and in an island cuisine indebted to Latin American cooking. For most of the twentieth century the island held, with slight fluctuations, at around seven thousand inhabitants. Only at the end of the century did that balance break: entry into the European Union, the commercialisation of farm and livestock production and an incipient tourism pushed the population above ten thousand in barely five years, and today it stands at around eleven thousand spread across the three municipalities.

El Hierro's present has turned the old arithmetic of scarcity into an argument about the future. The island has committed to renewable energy and to information and communication technologies within a set of initiatives aimed at energy efficiency and sustainability. The Gorona del Viento project, a wind-hydro plant combining wind turbines with water reservoirs, allowed El Hierro to become, from 2014, the first island in the world able to run on one hundred per cent renewable energy for extended periods, and it has become a reference model for small islands worldwide. UNESCO had declared the island a Biosphere Reserve in 2000 and recognised it as a Geopark in 2014. On that basis, low-density tourism —walking, diving, landscape— and a fishing activity with barely any carbon footprint define a small economy that has made an advantage of its scale.