Economy and Society of Gran Canaria

Gran Canaria's economy was born, after the conquest, tied to sugar cane. The crop demanded flat land, abundant water and a great deal of labour, and around those three needs were organised the land distributions that shared out among the new settlers the plains of the north and southeast together with the water that irrigated them. The books of 'Datas' preserve the detail of those distributions of land and water, which until the end of 1489 were directed and authorised by governor Pedro de Vera himself: made at his whim, they were sometimes fair, but were often inspired by the friendship, kinship or sympathies of the chief and of those around him, so that the best irrigated lots ended up in the hands of the conquering elite and of the foreign merchants and financiers able to pay for a mill. In the sixteenth century twelve sugar mills were counted on Gran Canaria, against four on La Palma and one on La Gomera: the island was by far the archipelago's great sugar centre. The scale of the business is well measured by an episode of 1495, when Alonso Fernández de Lugo sold two mills he owned on Canaria and with the proceeds bought weapons, flour, biscuit and barley for the conquest of Tenerife.

Sugar was succeeded by other crops turned towards the outside world. Wine exports began to gain importance, above all towards America, to the point that a royal decree declared that trade open; alongside the vine, barilla occupied the poorest coastal land for decades. The changeover came from the 1840s, when cochineal gradually replaced the vine and barilla as the export monoculture. The grain raised on prickly pears became the basis of the island's commercial prosperity and the engine of maritime exchange with the European ports of destination: the very debate over the port of Las Palmas was justified, in the mid nineteenth century, by the intense traffic that this commodity generated. The sequence of barilla, sugar, wine and cochineal ran through the archipelago between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries and tied its prosperity, time and again, to British capital and demand.

The collapse came by way of chemistry. The distillation of coal made it possible to obtain artificial dyes that competed with the cochineal of the Canaries and Guatemala, and by around 1880 the production of anilines and synthetic colourants was already an inescapable fact. Their greater cheapness and, above all, the independence they offered the British textile industry from the swings of overseas markets condemned the island grain, which even so retained some presence in European markets well into the twentieth century. The crisis was not merely agricultural: it exposed the fragility of a model based on a single export product and the scarcity of institutions able to redirect it. The Economic Societies of Friends of the Country of Tenerife and Gran Canaria took up the debate over which course agriculture should follow, and around it proliferated projects and reports whose fertility of ideas was as notable as their lack of means.

In parallel, the fiscal framework changed at the root. In July 1852 the government of Bravo Murillo passed a Free Ports law for the Canaries, later extended to the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, which would come to characterise the archipelago's economic and fiscal regime in a highly distinctive way within the contemporary Spanish state. The exemptions soon generated a sharp rise in imports, subject only to local levies, and turned Las Palmas into a small commercial emporium capable of competing with Santa Cruz de Tenerife, then capital of the single province. What was lacking, however, was the infrastructure. Around 1850 the burning question in the city was whether the quay conceived by the province's chief engineer, Francisco Clavijo y Pló, would be built in the bay of Las Isletas, or whether Las Palmas would go on depending on the old and exposed San Telmo quay, battered relentlessly by the swell.

The Ports Act of May 1880 opened the door by recognising as being of general interest the so-called ports of refuge, on account of their capacity, safety and shelter in storms. Political circumstance did the rest: in April 1881 Fernando León y Castillo, deputy for Guía de Gran Canaria, entered Sagasta's government as Minister for Overseas Territories. The creation of a Works Board was approved at once, and in November of that same year a project drawn up by his brother, the engineer Juan León y Castillo, was sent to Madrid and approved by royal order in March 1882. The tender was awarded in September 1882 to the London firm Swanston and Company, and works on the Puerto de Refugio of La Luz began on 26 February 1883. To the bay's natural conditions were added a breakwater and a berthing quay laid out perpendicular to it, plus small quays belonging to concession companies, almost all foreign; the whole was not completed until August 1902 and continued to be enlarged throughout the twentieth century.

The port turned the island into a logistical staging post of the eastern Atlantic. When shipping adopted the steel hull and steam propulsion, the great shipping lines of London and Liverpool had to open coaling houses at every point of the globe, and Cory Brothers and Co. established coal depots at Las Palmas, Madeira, Fayal, São Miguel in the Azores, São Vicente in Cape Verde and Tenerife. British-flagged vessels brought Welsh coal to supply the ships in transit, and the growth in tonnage, services and goods reached its peak between 1885 and 1913, on the eve of the First World War. Around that activity an ancillary fabric arose: shipyards and ship-repair workshops, ice factories that allowed passenger ships to restock their cold chambers, an electricity plant supplied by a Belgian company from Liège, and a British firm charged with bringing water to the city and the port from springs above San Mateo. On those same ships travelled the new plantation agriculture —tomatoes, bananas and potatoes— introduced above all by British capital in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and in full exploitation by the end of the 1880s.

The social counterpart of that dependent economy was emigration. When the export cycle contracted, thousands of Gran Canarians crossed the Atlantic: first towards Cuba and later towards Venezuela, destinations that popular memory described as a veritable El Dorado. They left young, often in groups of siblings, and in Havana or Ciego de Ávila they set up barbershops, stores and small businesses that served as meeting points for the islanders living there. Some made a fortune and others less so, but returning was almost always the goal, and those who came back brought with them capital that let them settle better in their home town and that was reinvested in houses, shops, social clubs and land. That coming and going left a lasting mark on island social life and a cultural bond with the Caribbean that far outlived the migratory cycle that created it.

The last great turn came from the 1960s, when the arid south —until then the island's least productive sector— became the axis of the economy. The dune beaches of the southern tip, part of the Maspalomas Dunes nature reserve, and enclaves such as Playa del Inglés, Puerto Rico and Mogán concentrated tourist urbanisation, while the capital added to its port and its commerce the appeal of Las Canteras, one of the finest urban beaches in the world, swimmable all year round. The result is an intensely service-based and highly urban island, with close to half its inhabitants concentrated in the capital. That capital had been formed by accumulation: the conurbation between the Puerto de La Luz and the city of Las Palmas, with Los Arenales and Ciudad Jardín in between, was completed in the interwar period, and since then the built-up area has never stopped climbing the slopes and spreading southwards. Institutionally, the island councils act of 11 June 1912 gave each island its own government, the provincial division of 1927 made Las Palmas de Gran Canaria the capital of the eastern province, and the Statute of Autonomy enshrined shared capital status with Santa Cruz de Tenerife, a balance that distributes seats and institutions and still shapes Canarian political life. Over that metropolitan society, which lives from services, the port and tourism, there still lies the old duality between the agricultural north and the tourist south, direct heir to the cycles of sugar, cochineal and bananas.