History of El Hierro

El Hierro is the westernmost and smallest of the main Canary Islands. Its history reads as a persistent tension between geographic remoteness and the need to adapt. Since antiquity it received names that spoke of water and strength: classical texts called it Pluriala, Ombrion or Iluvitina, references to the humidity that sustained it, while the pre-Hispanic inhabitants knew it as Eseró or Ferro, terms that, according to the chronicle of Fray Juan de Abreu Galindo, meant 'strong' and which the Spanish associated with iron precisely because of that idea of hardness.

Before the European arrival, the island was inhabited by the Bimbaches, a small community devoted mainly to pastoralism. They lived in dry-stone enclosures where several families gathered, roofed with ferns and branches, and wore leather garments sewn with animal sinews. Their basic foods were meat, milk, butter and fern roots; they did not grow wheat or barley. The land was flat inland but very rugged on the coast, making movement difficult and reinforcing its closed character. They possessed no weapons of war and had developed no military art, for they had no one to fight.

The symbolic and practical centre of the island was the Garoé, a tree the Bimbaches called garoe and which the settlers named the Holy Tree. It stood in the district of Tigulahe, in a ravine that rose from the sea to a rock face. According to Abreu Galindo, its leaves collected the fog and humid east wind and distilled it continuously, so that water fell into two large stone cisterns built at its feet. From this tree, whose trunk measured about twelve palms in circumference and whose crown reached one hundred and twenty feet in diameter, the inhabitants and their livestock were supplied. A guard paid by the council stood beside it to protect it and distribute the water, giving an idea of its collective importance.

The conquest of El Hierro was, compared with that of the other islands, almost peaceful. In 1405 Captain Juan de Betancor sailed from La Gomera to El Hierro and landed at the harbour the natives called Tecorone, near present-day La Estaca. The Bimbaches, remembering a prophecy of the soothsayer Yone —who had foretold that their god Eraoranhan would arrive from the sea in 'white houses'— received the Spanish without fighting. Abreu Galindo recounts that they even went to the cave where they kept Yone's bones and found them turned to ash, which they interpreted as the fulfilment of the omen. Betancor left Captain Lázaro as governor, but shortly afterwards he was killed by a Herreño after abuses by the soldiers; the incident was resolved by punishing the guilty and the island was subdued.

After the conquest, El Hierro became part of the lordship of the western islands, first linked to the interests of Bethencourt and later integrated into the domains of the Peraza family. Its small size, rugged terrain and distance from the main commercial circuits kept it on the margins of the prosperity that other Canarian ports attained in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was not a compulsory stop on the Indies route nor the seat of powerful institutions; its history was marked by isolation, extensive livestock farming and a population that barely grew.

Despite, or perhaps because of, that isolation, El Hierro acquired a singular symbolic projection in European cartography. Until the seventeenth century, the reference meridian used by navigators was located at Punta de la Orchila, on the western tip of the island. According to Roberto Gil Hernández, this imaginary line divided the world into eastern and western hemispheres and reflected the position of the Canaries as a bridge between Europe, Africa and America. It was not until 1884 that an international conference decided to unify the prime meridian at Greenwich, thus shifting the geodetic reference from the Atlantic to northern Europe.

Emigration, which so marked the demographic history of other Canary Islands, had much less weight in El Hierro. According to the 1837 report by T. E. Vidal cited in the Jornadas de estudios sobre Lanzarote y Fuerteventura, in El Hierro 'there was hardly any emigration' to the Antilles and the American mainland, while significant contingents left Tenerife, Gran Canaria, La Palma and La Gomera. This relative stability does not mean an absence of hardship: water scarcity, distance from markets and dependence on livestock shaped a fragile economy, but the population remained more closely tied to the land than in other parts of the archipelago.

In recent decades El Hierro has been reinterpreted as a laboratory of sustainability. In 2000 UNESCO declared it a Biosphere Reserve and in 2014 it was recognised as a UNESCO Global Geopark. These designations, together with energy-efficiency and sustainability initiatives recorded in recent publications, have turned the island's small scale and historical isolation into contemporary arguments of value. Artisanal fishing, livestock farming and the consumption of local products remain pillars of a society that has known how to adapt its limited resources to new demands.

El Hierro's geological memory returned to the fore between 2011 and 2012, when a submarine eruption occurred off its coast. The episode, documented by Carracedo and colleagues, was one of the most important recent volcanic crises in the archipelago and yielded new lessons on oceanic-island growth and risk management. Although the eruption altered daily life on the island, especially in La Restinga, it also reaffirmed the living, mutable character of a territory forged between volcanic fire and Atlantic water.

The history of El Hierro cannot be reduced to a sequence of dates. It is, above all, the history of a small community that has survived in an extreme corner of the Atlantic thanks to the fog of the Garoé, livestock raising on difficult terrain, a conquest without great battles and an isolation that has gradually been transformed into a model of balanced relationship with the land. Between the Orchila meridian and the 2011 eruption, the island retains its condition as a frontier and, at the same time, as a point of reference.