The Canary Island Gran Canaria

Facts
Size: 1.553 sqkm
Population: approx. 464.000
Capital: Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

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The first ‘tourist’ in Gran Canaria was Juba, the king of Morocco, then a roman colony. He was surprised to find huge savage dogs. He took two of them with him, baptised the island ‘Dog Island’ and left again. That was around the beginning of our calendar. The Romans, classically educated, didn’t call the islands ‘dog islands’ but ‘Insulae Canariae’. That was the origin of the name ‘Canary Islands’.

Though they were supposedly also called ‘the islands of happiness’ the dog name stuck up to our days. Little is know of the following centuries. The native inhabitants of the islands, the ‘Guanches’ never recorded anything. The only thing that is known is that the people from Geneva established a kind of regular ship traffic and caught the natives to sell them on the slave markets. The history of the following century is equally eventful. First the ‘Old Canarians’, also called ‘Guanches’ lived completely uninfluenced from the rest of the world. But this changed radically when the Canary Islands where noticed by the two big seafarer nations of Spain and Portugal. The Spanish, who landed on the islands in the 15th century, were surprised. Their country, being at the beginning of the renaissance, was full of fine, educated people. The things the Spanish found in the Canaries didn’t fit in their conception of the world. The ‘Guanches’ were a peculiar people, which missed the link to the metal ages (because there was no metal) and still lived in the stone ages.

They dressed in skins, only knew tools made of stone and wood and used wooden sticks to plough the fields. But they did have a culture. They had kings and priests and probably some kind of written language. Instead of burying their dead they embalmed them and put them in caves adding all of their house hold goods. When he Spanish came the Guanches showed that they knew how to fight with their primitive weapons too. They resisted more than half a century. Though their little shields and weapons made of wood, horn and stone weren’t successful against the conquerors in the long run, Gran Canaria was only fully under Spanish control in 1483. The conquering of this little island cost the Spanish more lives than the conquering of the whole huge realm of the Aztecs in Mexico.

The Guanches were subjugated, baptised and mixed with the new arrivals. Nothing is left of them apart from their caves, the Stone Age findings now displayed in museums and a lot of puzzling stories. In the years 1405/1406 Fuerteventura, the French Bethencourt conquered El Hierro and La Gomera for the Spanish crown. The natives of Grab Canaria suffered a devastating blow in their defence of the island in the year 1478 BC and Las Palmas was founded. 1485 Las Palmas became the residency of the bishop followed by the establishing of the Spanish court in 1527. This underlined the special position of Gran Canaria before the other islands of the archipelago. 1820 Las Palmas became capital of Gran Canaria but only 2 years later Santa Cruz de Tenerife became capital of the province of the Canary Islands and Gran Canaria lost in importance. Only in 1927 Las Palmas becomes a capital again but this time only of the eastern province of the Canary Islands. 1993 the Canaries were fully integrated in the EC.