Economy and Society of La Palma

La Palma's economy is explained by two resources that other islands in the archipelago did not possess to the same degree: water and a privileged Atlantic position. The abundant rainfall on the north-eastern side and the flows descending the Las Angustias ravine, the great natural outlet of the Caldera de Taburiente, allowed intensive irrigated agriculture in the Aridane Valley from a very early date, while the island's orientation towards the American route turned its eastern coast into a natural port of call for the fleets. From that combination arose an early, unequal and strongly hierarchical island society, organised around the distribution of water and overseas trade, whose successive cycles—sugar, wine, silk, tobacco and bananas—have left their mark on the agrarian landscape and on the island's social structure.

The first great cycle was sugar. In 1513 the Flemish gentleman Jácome de Monteverde settled on the island, a partner of the German Welser firm in La Palma's first agro-industry, and became absolute owner of the property and lordship of Tazacorte, with all its lands and waters from the Caldera to the sea, including the port of Tazacorte. The Lower estate, Tazacorte, and the Upper estate, later known as the Argual mill, formed an agro-industrial complex without equal on the island: fortified house and sugar mill made up a single unit, to which were attached the press house and boiling house, the furnaces, the purging house with its scaffolds and the refining house. Water was the key to the business and also its greatest cost: in 1518 Monteverde declared that he had invested 7,500,000 maravedís in the channels that irrigated his canes with the waters of the Tazacorte river, and in 1523 he valued at five million more the water extraction needed to irrigate the cane fields of Los Llanos. To his son Juan de Monteverde, captain general of La Palma, is owed the new channel that made it possible to bring irrigation to the lands of Argual in 1557, when the second sugar centre arose between Tazacorte and the settlement of Los Llanos.

That productive system generated a society of extreme contrasts. The estates of Argual and Tazacorte functioned as a kind of private lordship, a miniature state inhabited by the workers and slaves of the sugar owners, and their spatial organisation translated the social hierarchy into stone: the master's house, the mill and the dwellings of slaves and workers, joined by the chapel or hermitage with its own square, clearly marked the gradations running from lord to slave. The gallows, documented on both plantations in the property divisions of 1586, 1613 and 1619, symbolised the justice the landowners dispensed on their own authority, and the governor complained continually to the Crown about that second power which in fact existed on the island. The whole water share of the Argual and Tazacorte Heredamiento belonged to its creator, and that early appropriation of waters that were royal property conditioned La Palma's water law for centuries, as well as the settlement pattern of the valley itself, which grew crowded and full of winding streets so as not to take land away from the cane fields.

While sugar organised the interior of the western valley, the eastern coast organised itself around the port. Santa Cruz de La Palma, on an island whose coast is mostly cliff-lined and little suited to anchorages, established itself as a first-rate Atlantic port and a port of call on the route to America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and from that trade in sugar, wine and slaves came its first urban society, with Flemish, Genoese and Portuguese merchants settled alongside the conquerors and their heirs. That port wealth can still be seen today in the city's historic centre, a colonial past legible in its palaces, its Renaissance houses and its traditional architecture, in Calle O'Daly and the Avenida Marítima, in the church of El Salvador and the convent of Santo Domingo, and in the castle of Santa Catalina that defended the roadstead. The island's close relationship with the sea, which also sustained intense naval activity, is symbolically preserved in the Barco de la Virgen Naval Museum, a sailing ship beached in the middle of the town whose decks visitors can walk.

When Canarian sugar lost ground to American competition, wine took its place as the export crop, and the old estates filled with wine presses and ancillary buildings that coexisted with kilns, flour mills and threshing floors. Malvasía, the sweet wine that made the Canaries famous in northern European markets, was also produced in La Palma's mid-altitudes and remains, together with the wines of Fuencaliente, one of the island's agricultural hallmarks. Alongside the vine another craft-based activity prospered: the rearing of silkworms and the weaving of silk, for which the estates built dedicated silk-rearing houses. Sericulture, today virtually extinct in the rest of the archipelago, survives in La Palma as a living trade and is commemorated in the Silk Museum of El Paso, where the whole process is explained, from the rearing of the worms to the weaving and embroidery of the fibre.

The nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth were marked by emigration. The stagnation of traditional agriculture and recurrent crises pushed a large part of the island's inhabitants to emigrate to the Americas, and La Palma came to have one of the most intense emigrations in the archipelago, directed above all to Cuba and, later, to Venezuela. The Cuban link was so close that it left its mark on speech, music, architecture and daily life: those who returned, the indianos, invested their capital in land, businesses and stately houses, and brought with them the taste and the craft of tobacco, which took root on the island until the palmero cigar, hand-rolled with locally grown leaf, became one of La Palma's most recognisable products. Remittances and returns altered the structure of property and of island society as much as the sugar mills had done before.

The most decisive cycle of the twentieth century was the banana. The new export crops completely transformed the agrarian and forestry demands of the islands, and on La Palma the banana occupied the low-lying areas of both slopes through an enormous effort of soil transformation: the sorribas, terraces built by carrying great quantities of fertile soil down from the mid-altitudes to the warm coast on the backs of animals, are the material testimony of that rapid wealth. The expansion of irrigation also required boreholes that depleted the island's natural springs, and the pine forest of the Caldera was preserved in large part thanks to the interest of the irrigators of the Heredad de Argual y Tazacorte themselves in protecting the aquifer. The result was a monoculture of uncommon intensity: until a few years ago eighty per cent of the island's gross domestic product came from bananas, which today occupy some 4,000 hectares distributed equally between the two slopes, accompanied by smaller crops such as avocados and vineyards.

The last few decades have added two new activities and one traumatic episode. The installation of the astrophysical observatory on the Roque de los Muchachos, favoured by clean, protected skies offering unbeatable conditions for observing the stars, has made La Palma one of the most prestigious astronomical centres in the world and has generated skilled employment, international scientific cooperation and a night-observation tourism that adds to hiking in the Caldera de Taburiente and the laurel forest. Tourism, however, has grown in a contained way: the accommodation stock, including rural tourism, does not comfortably exceed 8,000 beds and is concentrated in Los Cancajos, next to the capital, and in Puerto Naos, the coastal sector of Los Llanos de Aridane. Onto that economy, on 19 September 2021, opened the Cumbre Vieja eruption, which for 85 days, until 13 December, buried homes, roads and banana plantations in the Aridane Valley and forced a reconstruction still under way. The island's population, stabilised for decades at around 80,000 inhabitants, is divided between two towns of some twenty thousand residents each, Santa Cruz de La Palma on the east coast and Los Llanos de Aridane in the western valley, the two economic capitals of an island that keeps reinventing how it lives from water, sea and sky.