Economy and Society of La Gomera

After the conquest, La Gomera was placed among the islands of señorío, governed by a handful of families. Following the Gomeran rebellion of 1488, much of the population continued to consist of descendants of the aboriginal islanders, whose herding, gathering and farming were absorbed into the new economic and jurisdictional system through the imposition of tributes and sharecropping labour. The seigneurial regime left a lasting mark: even after the dissolution of the señorío in the nineteenth century, a few magnates —some of them outsiders— went on occupying the best lands and controlling social power, and the sharecropping regime could require the tiller of the land to hand over two thirds of the produce to the owner, a survival of feudal customs long after the formal abolition of the señorío.

The first attempt at an export monoculture was sugar cane, introduced at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The first sugar mills were installed between 1502, in Hermigua, Vallehermoso and Valle Gran Rey, and 1504, in Alojera, the latter belonging to the Italian Blasino Inglesco da Piombino. Sugar served as a launching pad for the colonization of the island and forced the integration of the aboriginal population, while attracting a varied immigrant population: Portuguese, above all from Madeira, as skilled labour; noble and landowning families from Andalusia, Extremadura and Galicia; and converted Moriscos expelled from the Peninsula. The water-rich valleys allowed the permanent settlement of Europeans and the arrival of workers for the new plantations.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the great contemporary export crops arrived: bananas were introduced in Hermigua and Agulo, and tomatoes in the south of the island. Coastal infrastructure for shipping goods was built in Vallehermoso and Hermigua and the slow transformation of the port of San Sebastián began. But economic and political power remained in the hands of a few families: the scarcity of farmland consolidated two models of ownership — a small number of masters of the irrigated, higher-yield lands worked for export, against a numerous group of subsistence smallholdings. Until the mid-twentieth century the overwhelming majority of the population was rural, with a great many landless day-labourers and sharecroppers forming a reserve of cheap labour.

The sea was the other pillar. Gomeran history speaks of a past bound to fishing and the canning industry, in which salting and brining were widely used techniques. The island's only industrial centres were its three fish-canning factories —among them those of La Rajita and Vueltas—, owned by outsiders, raised at the water's edge and lacking roads towards the interior except for the steep footpaths the workers used to return home at weekends. On the arid southern coast, new villages tied to fishing, the cannery and the tomato, such as Playa Santiago, were born in the twentieth century. Tuna, horse mackerel and mackerel remain stars of the island's cuisine, and today Valle Gran Rey and Playa Santiago keep their fishing prominence, with the Nuestra Señora del Carmen guild and a fleet of twenty-five artisanal fishing boats registered in 2023.

The imbalance in the distribution of land and wealth was the main cause of a constant emigration, aggravated by the crises of the export crops. Between 1871 and 1975 more than forty thousand people left La Gomera, temporarily or permanently: half of all those born on the island. In the second half of the nineteenth century emigrants headed for Cuba and Tenerife; between 1900 and 1940 the population doubled on the strength of exports, but by 1940 the island had reached the ceiling of its economic structure, with more than 80 inhabitants per square kilometre in a territory with less than 10% of cultivable land, barely 1,000 hectares of irrigation and three small canning factories. Then came the period of greatest depopulation, between 1940 and 1970: agriculture, trade and fishing collapsed, and many Gomerans emigrated to Venezuela or to the central islands of the archipelago, abandoning above all the more isolated middle and upper zones.

From that peasant economy survive products that are now island emblems. Palm honey is made from guarapo, the sap that flows from the Canary palm once the crown of the palma guarapera has been dressed, a craft with its own vocabulary exclusive to La Gomera; palm honey and grape spirit are also combined into gomerón, and the island pantry includes almogrote, mistela and Gomeran biscuits. Craftwork preserves the earthenware pottery of the potter women of El Cercado and a basketry that draws on the branches of the woodland, and the street markets of Calle Real in San Sebastián and of Valle Gran Rey bring these products to the visitor.

From 1970 onwards, the rural settlement pattern, fragmentary but spread across the whole territory, gave way to the concentration of inhabitants in the places offering the best economic prospects: Valle Gran Rey, Playa Santiago and the capital, San Sebastián. Tourism prospects began to take shape at the end of the 1970s: a daily tourism from Tenerife soon consolidated, still very substantial and continuously growing, while a rural, nature-based tourism more in keeping with the values of the landscape was promoted. Today more than eight hundred thousand people visit Garajonay National Park every year, the ratio of tourists to residents is almost one to two, foreign residents amount to around 13% and the island's population stands at about 22,000 inhabitants, served by a network of footpaths that has turned the island into a hiker's paradise.

Gomeran society has also turned its most singular cultural asset into a living heritage. The Silbo Gomero, the whistled language that reproduces local speech, entered the classroom in the 1993-1994 school year and its teaching became compulsory in 1999-2000, under Order 1546 of 5 July 1999; Law 4/1999 sheltered it as part of the historical heritage of the Canaries. The regional government officially presented its candidacy to UNESCO on 23 September 2006 and the silbo was declared Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009. The silbo exhibitions that visitors witness today sum up the island's journey: a culture born of peasant necessity turned into a badge of identity and a resource for the future.