History of Fuerteventura

Before the arrival of Europeans, Fuerteventura was inhabited by the Majos, also known as Mahos or Majoreros. According to contemporary chronicles, the name Majorero came from the footwear they made from goat skins, a garment suited to the arid terrain and pastoral mobility. They lived in communities organized around the raising of goats and sheep and the cultivation of barley, making differentiated use of coastal areas, midlands and mountainous interior. They stored water in structures called maretas or aljibes, a vital infrastructure in an island where the scarcity of water shaped every activity. This was not a static society: transhumant herding, residential mobility and seasonal resource use defined both its economy and material culture.

At the time of the conquest, the island was divided into two political territories: Maxorata in the north and Jandía in the south, separated roughly by the area of La Pared or the Degollada de las Bovias. This territorial duality did not vanish with the arrival of Europeans. The conquest, begun by Juan de Bethencourt in 1402 and consolidated around 1405, turned Fuerteventura into a hereditary seigneurial lordship under Norman-Castilian rule. The island came to depend on a seigneurial structure that shaped social organization, tax collection and land distribution for centuries. Jandía in particular retained a specific importance as a grazing area and, later, as a dehesa or cattle estate of great significance for the island economy.

Fuerteventura's position in the Atlantic made it a recurring target of Maghrebi piracy. From Algiers and Salé, corsairs attacked its coasts between the 16th and 18th centuries, causing human losses, destruction of property and a permanent state of alert among the population. A particularly well-documented episode was the incursion of Xaban Arráez in 1593, which devastated the island and took more than sixty captives. These raids not only weakened the economy: they influenced the location of settlements, encouraged the abandonment of exposed coastal areas and forced the authorities to organize the defense of the coastline. The memory of these attacks was preserved in place names, family stories and in the very layout of inland villages.

The 18th century was a time of documented growth and devastating crisis at once. Authors of the period described Fuerteventura as a grain-exporting island devoted to goat rearing, a dual character that linked it to inter-island trade and food self-sufficiency. Yet between 1700 and 1705 a subsistence crisis caused by drought and hunger triggered mass emigration and the forced sale of land; January 1703 was identified as the most critical moment of that tragedy. Later, in 1778-1779, Fuerteventura took part in the Canarian emigration to Louisiana organized by the Spanish government, a movement in which labourers and young families left in search of land and a more stable life. These two waves —of hunger and of the Atlantic— reveal how the island oscillated between cereal self-sufficiency and dependence on a much wider world.

During the 19th century Fuerteventura's economy went through cycles of boom and collapse tied to export products such as barrilla and cochineal. For a time these crops promoted trade and mobilized labour, but their dependence on foreign markets made them especially vulnerable. The crisis of 1875-1884 hit particularly hard: between 1878 and 1887 the island's population fell by 12.4%, a decline that reflects both emigration and the deterioration of rural living conditions. Puerto Cabras, a port of growing importance, began to function as the de facto capital of the island. In 1956 it was renamed Puerto del Rosario, a decision that symbolized the shift of the administrative centre from the interior towards the coast and the sea.

The 20th century completed Fuerteventura's transformation. Emigration, first to the Americas and later to the Sahara and Venezuela, altered the demography, family ties and remittances that sustained the local economy. From the 1960s onwards tourism began to expand, shifting the economy towards services, especially in municipalities such as Pájara and La Oliva, where new infrastructure and external demand changed the landscape and the rhythms of daily life. In 1975 a Legion garrison was installed on the island, a sign of the territory's new strategic importance. The history of Fuerteventura cannot therefore be reduced to a succession of dates: it is the story of an island that learned to survive aridity, piracy, subsistence crises and the ups and downs of Atlantic trade, and that today preserves, alongside its tourist image, the deep-rooted traces of a pastoral and maritime past.