History of La Graciosa

La Graciosa is the largest island of the Chinijo Archipelago, a group of small islands located north of Lanzarote. According to the geological description of the Canary Archipelago, the Chinijo group covers an approximate area of about 40 km² and, in addition to La Graciosa, includes Alegranza, Montaña Clara, Roque del Infierno or del Oeste, and Roque del Este. La Graciosa occupies 26.6 km² and is the only one of these islands with population nuclei.

The island enters written history with the arrival of the Normans in 1402. According to Le Canarien, the chronicle of the conquest by Jean de Béthencourt and Gadifer de la Salle, the expedition set out from Cádiz and, after eight days of sailing, first reached the island of La Graciosa; from there it crossed to Lanzarote, where the conquerors were well received and established the settlement they named Rubicón. The port of La Graciosa remained present in the account: the ship Tajamar anchored there, and the traitor Bertin led his accomplices to it, taking advantage of the absence of Gadifer, who was on the island of Lobos, to promise its master the capture of forty of the best men of Lanzarote. The chronicle itself describes the coast of Lanzarote facing La Graciosa as so inaccessible that it would be impossible to enter it by force.

The origin of the name also dates from the time of the conquest. The chronicler Fray Juan de Abreu Galindo, in his History of the Conquest of the Seven Islands of Gran Canaria (1632), explains that the island was so named because it forms with Lanzarote a deep channel pleasing to the eye; the grace of that channel gave the island its name. This proximity to Lanzarote—separated by the narrow stretch of sea known as El Río, which historically served as a sheltered anchorage—has always marked its history.

During the early modern period, the surroundings of La Graciosa were the scene of the corsair danger that plagued the Eastern Canary Islands. Abreu Galindo himself notes that Lobos Island, between Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, served as a refuge for corsair ships. In the 18th century, North African piracy traversed these waters with particular intensity: Algerians and corsairs from Salé attacked Lanzarote and neighboring coasts between the late 16th century and the mid-18th century. In October 1724, a Dutch pinnace captured by Algerian corsairs reached Lanzarote; according to the account preserved in the proceedings of the I Jornadas de Historia de Fuerteventura y Lanzarote, the renegades conspiring to return the vessel to Christian territory agreed on their plan near the río de La Graciosa. There, Don Rodrigo Peraza went aboard pretending to be French, invited the corsairs to land, and once in the launch, seized a sabre from one of them, killed the boatswain, and secured the surrender of the rest. The channel of La Graciosa thus appears as a key geographic point in the defense against piracy.

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, interest in La Graciosa shifted from military defense to colonization and economic exploitation. Antonio María Manrique, in an article in La Vida Marítima cited in the I Jornadas, linked the development of the so-called El Río with the settlement and progress of La Graciosa, even proposing it as a privileged location for maritime sanatoriums and as a defensive piece of the Archipelago. In 1888 he tried unsuccessfully to obtain a concession to colonize the island; the initiative was private and found no support from the Government. Fishing, meanwhile, constituted the axis of economic life in the so-called minor islands of the eastern Canaries, as reflected in the study of a Canarian sloop in Saharan fishing between 1926 and 1942.

The permanent settlement of La Graciosa is, in fact, very late. After centuries without a stable population, the origin of the present village dates to around 1880, when a fish-preserving industry was set up in what is now Caleta de Sebo, as recorded in the historical and geographical study of the island cited in the VIII Jornadas de Estudios sobre Lanzarote y Fuerteventura. Since then, fishing has been fundamental for the graciosero population. The second nucleus, Pedro Barba, in the north of the island, has its origins in the first half of the 20th century and has hardly grown since: it went from 17 buildings in 1950 to 23 in 1995, today converted into small holiday homes that remain unoccupied for much of the year.

The natural singularity of its surroundings has shaped its most recent history. In 1987, the Islets and Cliffs of Famara were declared Spain's first maritime-terrestrial Natural Park, and Law 12/1994 of 19 December on Natural Spaces of the Canary Islands established the current boundaries of the Chinijo Archipelago Natural Park. Within this protected area, Caleta de Sebo concentrated 68% of the resident population at the end of the 20th century, and the management of the islets' fishing reserve has been the subject of constant dialogue, though in cordial terms of cooperation, between the administration and the graciosero fishermen.

Today, La Graciosa is administratively part of the municipality of Teguise, in Lanzarote, and its inhabitants are called gracioseros. In 2018 it was officially recognized as the eighth inhabited island of the Canary archipelago, the culmination of years of local advocacy for greater autonomy and representation. Known for this reason as 'The Eighth Island', it has two population nuclei, Caleta de Sebo and Pedro Barba, about three kilometres apart, and a population of fewer than six hundred, which underlines the small and singular character of this island, whose history has been determined by fishing, defensive strategy and its permanent link with Lanzarote.