History of Gran Canaria

The ancient Canarians called their island Canaria, which chroniclers described as the most populated and complex of the archipelago. Power was organized around the guanartemes or kings, with two great centres at Gáldar and Telde, assisted by the guaires or counsellors. Spiritual life revolved around Acorán, the supreme being, and the sun, called Magec; the faicanes, close relatives of the guanartemes, ordered the sacrifices and wielded a power that went beyond religion, with one faicán at Gáldar and another at Telde. In the almogarenes or holy houses of Tirma and Umiaya, goat's milk was poured out and offerings were burned, while the harimaguadas or maguas, women consecrated to worship, lived in seclusion devoted to prayer and teaching. That culture also left behind the pintaderas, baked-clay seals believed to have served as amulets and ornaments.

The heart of that world was Agáldar, the settlement that occupied the present historic centre of Gáldar, whose Plaza de Santiago served as a great ceremonial space, with the painted house as the meeting place of the indigenous aristocracy. In 1862, the reform of an orchard brought to light the Cueva Pintada, a decorated chamber that had been buried beneath the agricultural terraces. The Town Council arranged the site for visits in 1884, the deterioration of the paintings forced its closure in 1982 and, after a conservation project begun in 1986, the Cueva Pintada Museum and Archaeological Park opened on 26 July 2006. Its museum narrative is guided by Arminda, daughter of Guanarteme the Good, baptized after the conquest as Catalina de Guzmán.

The Castilian conquest began on 24 June 1478, when Captain Juan Rejón landed and founded the Real de Las Palmas beside the Guiniguada ravine, a military camp soon known as the Real de las Tres Palmas, the seed of the Vegueta district and of today's city. The Canarians, led by the chieftain Doramas, repelled the first attacks and blocked the Castilian attempts to penetrate the mountainous interior, so the war stalled for years: the Castilians could not conquer the highlands, nor could the islanders drive them from the coast. The arrival of Pedro de Vera revived the campaign, and the battle of Arucas in 1481, in which Doramas died, marked the turning point.

Vera then captured the guanarteme of Gáldar, Tenesor Semidán, who was taken to court, baptized as Fernando Guanarteme with Ferdinand the Catholic as his godfather, and committed through the so-called Pact of Calatayud to help pacify the island. The war still dealt the Castilians the disaster of Ajódar, where the defenders rolled tree trunks and boulders down onto the attackers and killed Miguel de Muxica with almost all his Biscayans. On 8 April 1483 Vera left the Real with more than a thousand men for the final campaign, which ended at the fortress of Ansite: Fernando Guanarteme persuaded most of the besieged to surrender, but Bentejuí and the faicán embraced and threw themselves into the void with the cry of "Atis Tirma". On 26 July 1483, the feast of Saint Anne, the young queen Arminda and her retinue came down into the Guiniguada valley, and the conquest, which had lasted five years and cost hundreds of lives, was concluded.

Once the island was incorporated into the Crown of Castile, the episcopal see of the Canaries was transferred to Las Palmas in 1485 and the town received the title of city in 1515. On the distributed lands rose a colonial economy centred on sugar cane: Gran Canaria came to have twelve sugar mills, more than any other island, tended by settlers from the Iberian Peninsula, Genoa, Portugal and Flanders and by enslaved labour. Sugar brought wealth and renown to the archipelago, but in the mid-sixteenth century competition from American sugar sank prices, and the crisis struck Gran Canaria especially hard while the wine cycle favoured Tenerife and La Palma.

Prosperity attracted greed: after Francis Drake's attack in 1595, on 26 June 1599 a Dutch fleet of 73 ships and 9,000 men under Admiral Pieter van der Does appeared before Las Palmas. The invaders took the city, which its inhabitants had abandoned in order to organize resistance from Santa Brígida and the Lentiscal forest. When a column of 4,000 Dutchmen advanced inland, the militias of Gáldar, Guía and la Vega ambushed it in the Lentiscal and inflicted more than a hundred dead. On 4 July Van der Does re-embarked, setting fire to the city behind him and carrying off scant booty; the Canarian defence remained one of the most celebrated feats in the island's history.

After two centuries of lethargy behind its walls, the nineteenth century brought recovery. Rivalry with Tenerife fuelled the so-called pleito insular, the inter-island dispute, which as early as 1852 led to the division of the province into two administrative districts. From 1859 cochineal, raised on prickly pears to produce dye, generated fabulous harvests and fortunes until chemical dyes sank the business. The decisive impulse came with the León y Castillo brothers: the engineer Juan designed the harbour of refuge in the roadstead of La Luz, and the politician Fernando, born in Telde, secured its approval in the Cortes in 1882; the works were inaugurated on 26 February 1883. The Puerto de La Luz transformed the city, attracted the English colony and opened the island's economy to Atlantic traffic.

The inter-island dispute culminated in 1927, when the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera divided the archipelago into two provinces, with capitals in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The world wars and the Civil War brought difficult decades and intense emigration to America, but from the 1960s tourism, together with port and commercial activity, revived the economy and turned the island into one of the great destinations of the Atlantic. Today Las Palmas de Gran Canaria shares the capital status of the Autonomous Community with Santa Cruz de Tenerife, as laid down by the Statute of Autonomy, and its Puerto de La Luz, the largest in this area of the Atlantic, remains the gateway through which Gran Canaria converses with three continents.