The Canary Island El Hierro History

Facts
Size: 280 sqkm
Population: ca. 10.000
Capital: Valverde (approx. 1850 Einwohner)

‘Punta de Orchilla, the last visible sign of the European world’ is what Christopher Columbus wrote in his logbook on his second trip to America on the 3rd of October 1493 when he passed El Hierro.

Only one year earlier he broadened the known horizon a few thousand miles to the west. In the 2nd century the mathematician and geographer Claudius Ptolemäus established the zero meridian at the west cape of the island, the ‘Punta de Orchilla’.

It was only in 1883 when it was moved to Greenwich, England. Since then El Hierro embodies the end of the world. Somewhere behind El Hierro, the people in the middle ages thought, the sea plunges into a big maw and all ships that dared to go that way must inevitably be destroyed. Up to a few years ago more than 80 % of the inhabitants lived in the north of the high plain of ‘Nisdafe’, the rest lived mainly in the villages of ‘El Pinar’. ‘El Golfo' was only sparely inhabited. That changed only when the road to the golf was build in the thirties. In the last years a lot of agricultural areas developed.