FUERTEVENTURA

The island was first formed by volcanic eruptions which started around 20 million years ago, and ended about 5 million years ago; and these created the oldest and second largest (1660 km2) Canary Island. The last volcanic eruption on the island was 4-5,000 years ago (2000-3000BC). Since then the volcanic landscape has been eroded by the weather.

In the early history of Fuerteventura, it is believed that the first settlers on the island arrived from North Africa, and they lived in caves and underground holes. There is a museum at La Atalayita, in the Antigua municipality, which shows these dwellings and the type of tools and pottery they used. These people lived there from the 5th Century BC onwards, and were known as the "Guanches." They lived in the Stone Age and had flocks of goats.

From the 11th Century, different settlers arrived on the island – the Phoenicians, the Spanish and the Portugese.

In the later history of Fuerteventura, the island was divided into two kingdoms. Jandia was in the south of the island, and Maxorata was in the north. A wall separated the two, close to La Pared, and some of it remains intact today. Two of the kings were Ayoze, who ruled the south, and Guize, who ruled the north. At this time, the island was known as Herbania, and it was also known as Planeria at some stage. Ayoze and Guize are such an important part of Fuerteventura’s history that giant statues of them have been placed at the view point above the old capital Betancuria.

Early island people were known as ‘Mahorero’ or ‘Maho’ which derives from the word ‘mahos’ which were shoes made out of goat skin that were worn by the early settlers. The word ‘Majorero’ is used today to describe someone who is born on the island.

A major event in the history of Fuerteventura was The Conquest, which began in 1402 and ended in 1406. The Frenchman, Juan de Bethancourt led the conquest of the island after leaving Lanzarote. With his general, Gadifer de La Salle and 63 men, they landed at Ajuy on the west coast and conquered the island. He established the first major settlement on the island, Betancuria, and it became the capital.

At this time the population of the island was 1,200; and was called "Forte Ventura" (this is the name as it appears, for the first time, on a map by Angelino Dulcert, in 1339). "Forte" means strong and "Ventura" could mean wind, luck or destiny).

From 1476, the island was ruled by the Spanish military and influential families. A military Colonel ruled the island from 1708, when construction
began on the Casa de Coroneles (the Colonel’s House) in La Oliva. This impressive residence is now a museum after extensive renovations in 2006.

From then on,the island was invaded by the Spanish, French and English, and suffered frequent pirate raids. To avoid these types of attacks, several castles were built along the coast, and most of the population moved inland. The Castillo de San Buenaventura in Caleta de Fuste is a good example of this. A famous part of Fuertentura history is the English pirate raid in 1740, which was thwarted by the local farmers, and this Battle of Tamasite, is celebrated every year in Tuineje on October 12.

In the more recent history of Fuerteventura, parishes were created in La Oliva, Pajara and Tuineje in 1835, and this created the municipalities that exist today.

In 1859 the control of the island ended, and in the following year, Puerto Cabras became the capital of the island. In the 1950’s Puerto Cabras changed its name to Puerto del Rosario.

In 1917, Fuerteventura became part of the province of Gran Canaria.

As with the other Canary Islands, Lanzarote’s early history is veiled in myth and mystery, especially because it is the oldest of the Canaries, with about 180 million years. Populated for at least 2000 years, according to recent archaeological discoveries, Lanzarote was originally inhabited by Berbers, a people from North Africa. Grazing, fishing and agriculture were the main forms of livelihood for these first inhabitants, who became known as ‘Majos’.

Greeks and Romans certainly knew of the existence of these islands, as proven by excavations in Lanzarote, where pieces of metal and glass were found. These artefacts, dated between the first and the fourth centuries, proved that Romans used to trade with the people of these islands, though there is no evidence they ever set foot there.

After the fall of the Roman Empire (476AD), the Canary Islands fell into oblivion for almost 1,000 years, to be then rediscovered in the early 14th century by Mediterranean sailors. In fact, it is widely
believed that the name "Lanzarote" derives from Lanzarotto (or Lancelotto) Malocello, a Genoese sailor, who first moored on the island in the early 1300s. After this, Lanzarote was invaded several times by Europeans, who sought to conquer wealth and glory, by capturing natives to work as slaves in their countries.

Over the years, many expeditions headed to the Canaries, but the ultimate conquest began, in the early 15th century, under the fist of the Norman explorers Juan de Bethencourt and Gadifer de la Salle.
Since Lanzarote was, at that time, an extremely depopulated island, natives were willing to sign a non-aggression and friendship pact with the invaders, receiving in return protection against pirates and slavers.

Later, Juan de Bethencourt named his nephew, Maciot de Bethencourt, the first governor of Lanzarote, and then returned to France. Maciot would then marry Princess Teguise of Lanzarote and found a town after her name.

But conquering Lanzarote – as well as Fuerteventura, La Gomera and El Hierro – was, actually, no great feat, since the small native population on these islands had already been decimated by the diseases introduced by the Europeans during the years of slave trading. So, to increase the local population, many slaves were taken from North Africa, and dromedaries were also brought to this island.

At the beginning of the Spanish conquest, the islands of the archipelago experienced different histories. While the bigger islands of Gran Canaria and Tenerife still rendered fierce resistance – it took almost a century until they finally surrendered to the Spanish crown – the process of exploration and colonisation of Lanzarote was already going strong. Soon, the first churches were built and the surviving Majos were forced to convert to Christianity.

The island's first recorded settlers were the bimbaches or bimbapes, a native tribe that lived on the island at least from the year 120 AD until it was conquered by Juan de Bethencourt for the Kingdom of Castile. The bimbaches or bimbapes left us numerous petroglyphs, such as those in El Julan, where they are most extensive and meaningful and where we can also see remains of the ancient meeting placed called Tagoror.
They lived in caves or simple stone dwellings, in balance with their island environment, from which they obtained sufficient resources for subsistence. Agriculture, farming, hunting, fishing and gathering were their usual activities.
The Role of the Kingdom of Castile
Later, the Kingdom of Castile paid French-Basque mercenaries to conquer it. As of that time, the lands and other resources were no longer divided up equally but were distributed using a feudal system.
On 6 January 1546, the statue of the Virgen de Los Reyes (Virgin of the Kings) arrived by boat. The sailors gave it to some island shepherds in exchange for provisions. That is how it came to belong to and be the patron of the shepherds of La Dehesa and one of the most decisive features of the history of El Hierro. Today it is the islanders' most profound social and religious symbol.
Columbus on the Island
In 1493, the island received the visit of one of the most famous and important historical figures of all times. On his second voyage to America, Christopher Columbus made a 17-day port of call to the island, gathering supplies of water and food, and also waiting for better winds to push him towards the Americas.
The medical benefits of El Hierro
Throughout the 19th century, El Hierro became an island where politicians, military leaders and liberals were sent to live in exile. Nonetheless, this was beneficial for the island when Leandro Pérez was exiled there. He was the island's first doctor and confirmed the healing properties of the water from the Pozo de la Salud – a well in Sabinosa. Numerous other doctors later certified the properties of these waters and the spring became known as a place of pilgrimage.
In 1899, a fire burnt the Valverde Town Hall to the ground, destroying the archives created in 1553. In 1912, the Valverde and Frontera town councils were created and the island acquired self-governance. On 15 September 2007, the municipality of El Pinar was constituted, making it the youngest in all of Spain.
An island with a lot of history created out of lives and stories experienced here.

The History of La Palma
The Canary islands were known in antiquity as the Western edge of the known world. Homer referred to the Islands of the Blest, lying westward of Maurusia (modern-day Morocco) (see extract from Strabo). The Canaries have also been associated with Plato's description of the island of Atlantis (see extract), though most modern historians discount this suggestion.
It is likely that the first people to discover the Canaries were early Phoenician explorers, originating from Sidon and Tyre in modern-day Lebanon. Herodotus claims that a Phoenician expedition circumnavigated Africa in the 6th century BC (see extract). Carthage, a north-African Phoenician colony, sent a colonising expedition of 30,000 people to the west of Africa in about 425 BC (see extract from Hanno). Phoenician coins are claimed to have been found as far afield as the Azores. Thor Heyerdahl sailed from Africa to South America via the Canary Islands in the Ra, a boat made of papyrus, in order to prove that the journey was possible for ancient mariners.
Around 120 AD, Marinus of Tyre wrote that the habitable world was bounded on the west by the Fortunate Islands. The status of the Fortunate Islands as the western edge of the known world was more formally established when Claudius Ptolemy (AD 90 - 168), following Marinus, adopted the Fortunate Islands as the prime meridian for his Geographia. This was the most famous classical map of the world, unsurpassed for almost 1500 years. The Canaries continued to be widely used as the prime meridian for maps of the world until well into the 19th century - for example, Louis XIII decreed that EL Hierro be used as prime meridian on all French maps in 1634, and this continued until about 1800. Dutch maps of the period used the peak of El Teide on Tenerife as their prime meridian. (see for example this 18th century English engraving).
The Romans are known to have explored the Canary Islands. The most complete classical account of the Canaries is by Pliny the Elder (see extract), taken from a description of an expedition sent by Juba II, governor of the Roman protectorate of Mauretania (modern-day Morocco) from about 29 BC to 20 AD. The islands were found to be uninhabited at the time of this expedition, though Junonia (the Roman name for La Palma) did have a 'small temple built of a single stone', presumably evidence of earlier inhabitants or explorers.
During the middle ages the Canaries become more myth than reality. They figure for example in the search by St Brendan (c. AD 484 - 578) for paradise, which he assumed to be an island in the Atlantic Ocean (map).
Around the end of the 13th century, the Canaries were rediscovered by a Genoese fleet under Lancelot Malocello. A detailed survey was made by Nicoloso de Recco of Genoa in 1341. A papal bull of 1433 awarded rights over the Canaries to Henry the Navigator of Portugal, but this decision was reversed in 1436, when another papal bull awarded these rights to the crown of Castile. In the Alcovas treaty of 1479, Portugal recognised the rights of the Castilians to the Canaries, in return for Castilian recognition of Portugese sovereignty over Fez and Guinea.
At the time of the rediscovery of the Canaries they were inhabited by an indigenous people called the 'Guanches'. We know from cultural similarities that the Guanches were Berbers from the mountains of Northwest Africa. How they reached the Canaries has been the subject of much speculation, particularly since at the time of the rediscovery they apparently had no knowledge of seafaring techniques - surprising for a people living on a small island with other nearby islands clearly visible.
There is evidence for two distinct Guanche racial types , usually referred to as 'Cro-Magnoid' and 'Mediterranean'. Pottery remnants suggest there were up to four distinct waves of colonisation, whilst carbon dating techniques suggest that the first colonists arrived during the first millenium BC.
The Guanches named their island Benahoare, and divided it into 12 kingdoms, each with its own ruler (see map, list). Estimates of the Guanche population at the time of the conquest range from 1,200 to over 4,000.
The Guanches lived in caves, such as those at Belmacho near Mazo , and at Zarza in Garafía . They mummified their dead. The Gaunche religion appears to have centred around stone pyramids, and the Roque Idafe in the Caldera de Taburiente. The legacy of the Guanches includes carvings of geometrical forms and hand-made decorated pottery. Reproductions of these pots are still made, in the artesania El Molino in Mazo
The conquest of the Canaries took from 1402, when Juan de Bethencourt landed on Lanzarote, to 1496, when Tenerife fell to Alonso Fernandez de Lugo. The conquest of La Palma started on the 29th of September of 1492, with the landing on the beaches of Tazacorte by Fernandez de Lugo, and finished on the 3rd of May of the following year. The last king of Benahoare to submit himself to the invaders was the legendary Tanausu, who ruled the Kingdom of Acero (Caldera de Taburiente). After two failed attempts by the Castilian conquistadors to penetrate La Caldera to defeat him, Fernandez de Lugo sent a man called Juan de Palma, a relative of Tanausu already converted to christianity, to establish a truce. Tanausu agreed, but Fernandez de Lugo broke the agreement, and Tanausu was captured in an ambush. Tanausu was taken away into slavery, but refused to eat after leaving the island, and died without seeing land again.
After the conquest, Alonso Fernandez de Lugo was appointed the first governor of Tenerife and La Palma. Since he had been personally responsible for financing the conquest, he was endowed by the crown with powers rather more extensive than the governors of the other islands. These powers included the disposition of slaves, the right to control entry and exit from the islands, to exercise civil and criminal jurisdiction, and to appoint and dismiss judicial deputies.
The richness of the island resulted in immigration not just from Castille, but also of Portugese, Italians, Catalans, Basques and other northern Europeans. Indeed, Fernandez de Lugo was accused at successive judicial enquiries of favouring Genoese and Portugese above native Castilian. The period of immigration was intense but relatively short-lived - after the 1520s immigration almost ceased, until the eighteenth century.
For an impression of La Palma in the period following the conquest, see this map produced by Leonardi Torriani, an Italian engineer who toured the Canaries fron 1587 to 1593 on an inspection of the islands fortifications.
Despite the large number of immigrants, the Guanches did not disappear, being assimilated rather than exterminated. Gaspar Frutuoso writing at the end of the 16th century described the population of La Palma as being evenly divided between Castilian, Portugese and indigenous peoples. He reported these elements of the population as already being largely interbred, indistinguishable in faith and custom, and coexisting as equals.
The principal produce in pre-conquest days were dye-stuffs and shells. Of particular importance was orchil, a moss-like dye-stuff. Wheat was introduced during the 15th century, but towards the end of the century sugar became the dominant export. Apiculture thrived alongside the sugar industry, producing both honey and beeswax.
From the beginning of the 16th century the sugar industry was the basis of a commercial boom. Shipbuilding enterprises were established and Santa Cruz de La Palma's port developed sea connections with Europe and America. The primary interest of foreign merchants was the export of sugar in return for the import of cloth. Hakluyt described the trade by Nicholas Thorne of Bristol in 1526, who exchanged sugar, orchil and goatskins for cloth 'both coarse and fine, broad and narrow, of divers sorts and colours'.
La Palma figured prominently in this boom. One of the largest holdings in the Canaries was the estate held from 1513 by the Welzers, a German banking family, which included all the waters of the Tazacorte valley. Sugar was being produced for export from La Palma in 1515 by the English merchant Thomas Malliard, in partnership with the Genoese Francesco Spinola, at a refinery at Rio de Los Sauces.
The Canaries became strategically important as a stopping point on the route to the newly-discovered Americas. Christopher Columbus stopped at the Canaries (but not La Palma) to restock before crossing the Atlantic for the first time, and later mariners followed the same pattern. The transatlantic sailings were known as the 'carrera de Indias'. From early spring ships would leave Sevilla and follow the clockwise pattern of the prevailing Atlantic trade winds down to the Canaries, and thence across through the islands of the Lesser Antilles into the Southern Caribbean - see the 'Secret Instruction for Navigation between Spain and the Isle of Santo Domingo', published in 1526 by the Casa de Contratacion, the body established in 1503 to regulate the transatlantic trade.
The prosperity of the Canaries attracted famous pirates and corsairs of the time, particularly the French Jambe de Bois (Peg-Leg) who sacked Santa Cruz de La Palma in 1553. Most of the older buildings that can now be seen in Santa Cruz date from the subsequent rebuilding of the city. In 1585 Santa Cruz was attacked by an armada of 24 ships commanded by the English pirate Francis Drake, resulting in the destruction of the harbour fort.
The expansion of the Brazilian sugar industry in the last quarter of the sixteenth century dramatically reduced the demand for Canarian sugar. Wine replaced sugar as the principal export. Of particular importance was the production of Malvasia, a sweet dessert wine.
Malvasia wine remained a major source of income throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the wine being exported to Britain and the American colonies. The position of the Canaries on the route to the Americas made commerce with the colonies particularly attractive.
The Canarian economy was affected throughout much of this period by trade restrictions imposed by the Casa de Contratacion in Sevilla, which was responsible for overseeing the crown monopoly on trade with the American colonies. For example, in 1610 exports from the Canaries were limited to a total of 1000 tons, of which 300 was from La Palma. The destination of these exports was also restricted. In 1613 the total was reduced to 600 tons and in 1627 to 700. Regulations introduced in 1678 required 5 families to emigrate to America for every 100 tons of exports.
A more liberal regime was introduced by Charles III in the second half of the 18th century. Trade was liberalised from 1778 onwards, and produce included cotton, tobacco and silk. During the 18th century the port of Santa Cruz was regarded as the third largest of the empire, after Antwerp and Sevilla. (see 'Civitas Palmaria', an 18th century watercolour of Santa Cruz).
Portugese and Madeiran wines provided strong competition to Malvasia throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. The wine trade with England slumped at the beginning of the 19th century, with the introduction of port wine to the English market.
The wine trade was replaced around 1825 by the growing of cochineal, a cactus parasite used as a food colouring, which became an important source of income. However, this industry was hit by the introduction of artificial colourings in the 1870s, resulting in widespread hardship.
The production of sugar cane reappeared, and around 1880 a rudimentary tourist industry started. At the turn of the century the first banana plants appeared. The resulting prosperity was however to be short-lived, due to the effects of world war 1 on foreign trade.
Economic hardship during the latter part of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century resulted in high levels of emigration, Cuba being the preferred destination up to the 1930s, and Venezuala subsequently. Many Canarians retain strong family links with Cuba and Venezuala.
The Canarian economy continued to be dominated by agriculture until the early 1960s. Liberalisation introduced by the Franco regime from 1960 onwards allowed an economic revival, based on bananas, annual exports of which exceed 130 million kilograms, plus other produce, forestry and tobacco. Most important of all was the growth of the tourist industry, from 73,240 tourists in 1960 to over 2 million tourists in 1975.