Economy and Society of Fuerteventura

Before the conquest, the Maho society of Fuerteventura lived above all from livestock. Goats and sheep provided meat, milk, hides and tallow, and herding organised the territory with corrals, toriles and goyres for separating the kids and, above all, with gambuesas: large stone enclosures where free-roaming animals were gathered so that their owners' marks could be recognised. That collective operation, the apañada, and the ahijamiento or matching of young to their mothers survived the conquest and continued for centuries as a communal use of pasture that set the island apart. Gambuesas can still be traced beside the beach of Jarugo, in the badlands of Montaña Quemada or on the Jandía side, where the Gambuesa de La Solana, that of El Mulato and that of Las Pilas are preserved.

The Norman conquest of 1402 imposed on Fuerteventura a seigneurial regime that would shape its economy well into the nineteenth century. The lords of the island did not merely collect rents and fifths on the fruits of the land: they also reserved the exclusive exploitation of wild resources such as orchil, the dye lichen that grew on crags and cliffs. Sixteenth-century European descriptions summed up the island in a few words: moderately fertile in wheat and barley, and also in cattle, goats and orchil, and belonging to the same lord as Lanzarote. That scheme — pasture, grain and gathering — defined for generations a country poor in money, dependent on rainfall and highly exposed to the decisions of a few.

Grain made Fuerteventura, together with Lanzarote, the so-called "granary of the Canaries". In rainy years the island produced enough wheat and barley to export to the central islands, Tenerife and Gran Canaria, and that epithet was repeated in the documentation for centuries, until contemporary agriculture left it behind. The technical key were the gavias: flat plots enclosed by earthen ridges that absorb the runoff waters of the ravines, related to the nateros and to the sanded fields of the neighbouring islands. Besides making sowing possible in a territory with less than two hundred millimetres of annual rainfall, the gavias check soil erosion, retain nutrients and favour aquifer recharge, which is why their abandonment is today regarded as an environmental problem.

In the shadow of grain, three export products prospered. Orchil, monopolised by the seigneury, produced notorious lawsuits: at the end of the eighteenth century Don Agustín Cabrera Bethencourt, colonel of the Royal Armies and a resident of Fuerteventura, went to court against those who bought the lichen outside the seigneurial privilege, and the Royal Audiencia ruled in his favour, obliging the islanders to hand the herb over to him. Barilla, from whose ashes soda for soap and glass was obtained, enjoyed its heyday at the turn of the nineteenth century — so much so that a traveller described Puerto de Cabras as "a market of barilla and cereals" — and prompted technical memoirs presented to the Royal Economic Society. Lime, fired in coastal kilns, completed the repertoire and supplied the island's building works.

That economy was extremely fragile. It was enough for the rain to fail for the granary to empty and hunger to arrive, a cycle so often repeated between 1600 and 1800 that it has earned monographs of its own. The councils turned to the Marquis of Lanzarote or to the neighbouring islands to import grain, and when there was no remedy the alternative was to leave the island or perish: the majoreros fled first to Lanzarote and Gran Canaria, then to other islands of the archipelago and, from the nineteenth century, in waves towards America. The crises of the last third of the eighteen hundreds — poor harvests and epidemics such as yellow fever — again triggered the outflow of population, documented in detail in the files of the Puerto de Cabras town council between 1835 and 1900.

Above that peasant society rose an extraordinarily concentrated local power. In La Oliva, the colonels of the Provincial Militias accumulated, throughout the eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth, military command, control of the cabildo, the collection of tithe revenues and the management of seigneurial lands. Their residence, the Casa de los Coroneles, with dozens of balconies and wooden galleries, was declared a historic-artistic monument and is still read as the centre of the island's economic, political and administrative domination, which is why its full recovery together with its whole setting has been proposed. Around it, interrelated militia captains and second lieutenants bought disentailed lands in the nineteenth century and consolidated a very stable rural oligarchy.

Sea and livestock sustained what grain could not. The majoreros took part in the fisheries of the Saharan bank and the African coast, where wreckfish and other species were preserved salted or dried and where boats had to sail ever further south to fill their holds; already in the twentieth century industrial canning displaced those traditional methods. Cheese, by contrast, never lost ground: it appears in the fabric books and in the tithes from the seventeenth century, when the Church collected the half-tithe of cheeses, lambs and kids from the whole island, and the custom of mixing goat's and sheep's milk to obtain a richer paste anticipates today's queso majorero, now the gastronomic emblem of Fuerteventura.

Tourism arrived late and all at once. Against the early take-off of Tenerife and Gran Canaria, in Fuerteventura the first hotels of Jandía and the apartment blocks of Corralejo, along with the Parador Nacional built near Puerto del Rosario, did not materialise until the nineteen-sixties. The real explosion came afterwards: between 1970 and 1974 dozens of hotel plans were processed, almost always extending the existing centres of Corralejo and Jandía, to which Costa Calma and Caleta de Fuste were added. The large establishments built on the jable altered the dune dynamics south of Corralejo and forced the protection of the system, while the island moved from exporting emigrants to receiving population from other islands, from mainland Spain, from Europe and from Latin America, reversing in a few decades a demographic history of centuries.