Economy and Society of Tenerife

Tenerife's economic history can be read as a succession of Atlantic export cycles. From the conquest onwards, the island lived by placing a dominant product on foreign markets — sugar, wine, cochineal, bananas, tomatoes — and through the crises that followed whenever that product lost price or buyers. Each cycle redistributed land, water and population, and each crisis pushed thousands of Tenerife islanders towards America. That alternation of booms and busts, always mediated by the sea, is the key that links colonial society with today's island of services and tourism.

The first cycle was sugar. After the conquest, the distribution of land and water through the datas set an export-oriented colonial economy in motion: in 1505 alone more than a thousand hectares were distributed in Tenerife, and the best irrigated plots were granted together with the water that made them valuable. The sugar agro-industry prospered in Tenerife as in La Gomera, La Palma and, above all, Gran Canaria, and with it a whole insular law of water was born: irrigation channels, reservoirs, wells dug in the beds of the ravines — like those that later belonged to the Marquis of Adeje — and simple capture galleries or mines that anticipate the great water mining of later centuries.

Sugar was replaced by wine, and in particular malvasía, which drew the merchants of northern Europe to Tenerife. After peace was settled with England in the mid-seventeenth century, several English traders, seeing in the malvasía wine trade a business of valuable and secure profits, formed a company called the Canary Company with royal privilege and sent to Tenerife, the central point of their venture, agents who bought the best wines at low prices to sell them in London at a fabulous profit. The monopoly sparked open conflict: the town council of La Laguna and the Audiencia expelled the English factors and forbade selling wine to the London company, and squads of three to four hundred masked men entered the cellars at night to break the casks and spill the coveted liquor.

The island's commercial axis shifted over the centuries towards Santa Cruz. The eruption of 1706 had destroyed Garachico and Tenerife's only natural harbour, and the Santa Cruz roadstead, habitual residence of the commanders general since the time of Valhermoso, concentrated traffic and power: the country's produce arrived daily for sale within its bounds. The law of 27 January 1822 proclaimed it capital of the province of the Canaries, which then numbered 213,108 souls, and the Free Ports Law of 1852, promoted by Bravo Murillo, opened the archipelago to free trade and consolidated the port as a stopover of Atlantic commerce between Europe, Africa and America.

The nineteenth century belonged to cochineal. The dye insect reached Spain in 1820, when eight prickly-pear plants laden with cochineal were sent from America to the Economic Society of Cádiz, and a decree of the Cortes of 29 June 1822 ordered its cultivation extended to provinces with a suitable climate. The Canaries came to be almost the world's only producer, but the business remained in the hands of the British agents who monopolised the purchase of the raw material and fixed its price. When the market collapsed, the agricultural crisis of around 1880 opened a debate that divided the island: devote the land to subsistence crops to cheapen the food of an impoverished population, or bet on new export crops.

The second option prevailed. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the British introduced into the two main islands the new plantation agriculture of banana, tomato and potato, which dominated Tenerife's countryside during the twentieth century and still leads its export agriculture. But not even the new cycle stopped the demographic drain: the scarcity of resources and employment fed a growing emigration towards America, above all to Cuba — whose war of independence culminated in the loss of the island in 1898 — and later to Venezuela, currents that left a family, cultural and economic imprint still perceptible today, also in the form of returns and remittances.

Tourism was born in parallel. From 1887, studies by British doctors and scientists on the island climate gave rise to a therapeutic tourism that made the Orotava Valley and Puerto de la Cruz its pioneering stage: by 1895 Anglo-Saxon tourism already carried considerable weight in the archipelago's economy, with hotels under English administration, and in the early twentieth century came the great establishments such as the Hotel Taoro or the Humboldt-Kurhaus, the electric tramway, a German meteorological observatory in Las Cañadas del Teide and even a scientific station in Puerto de la Cruz for the study of primates. On that basis, mass tourism transformed the arid south from the sixties and seventies onwards: the opening of Reina Sofía airport in 1978 propelled the take-off of Adeje, Arona and the neighbouring municipalities.

Today's Tenerife society, with a population of around 930,000 inhabitants, lives above all from services, port commerce and tourism. La Laguna, turned into a literary and scientific centre by gatherings such as the Tertulia de Nava — where Viera y Clavijo first tried his pen — after the early attempt at a university in the convent of San Agustín, is today the island's university city and shares with Santa Cruz the administrative centrality of the western province. The other face of the model is the agrarian retreat: much farmland has been taken over by tourist and residential building, and the agriculture that resists takes refuge in bananas, tomatoes and greenhouses, witnesses to an island that traded the countryside for the service sector without ceasing to look towards the Atlantic.