Canary Islands

Volcanoes off the coast of Africa

The Canaries are ocean volcanoes in the North Atlantic, about 100 km off the north coast of Africa and 1,000 km from the Iberian Peninsula. By area, the main islands are Tenerife, Fuerteventura, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote, La Palma, La Gomera, El Hierro and little La Graciosa.^[3] Fuerteventura, the oldest, rose 12–20 million years ago.^[3] Teide on Tenerife, 3,718 m high, is the highest peak on Spanish soil and rises 7,500 m above the ocean floor.^[4]

Ninety-four years of conquest

In 1402 the Norman lord Jean de Béthencourt and the French knight Gadifer de La Salle landed in the south of Lanzarote. Béthencourt had the backing of King Henry III of Castile: he would claim the conquered land for the Castilian crown and rule it as its lord. He went on to El Hierro and took Fuerteventura in 1405, where he founded Betancuria, the first town in the islands.^[7]

The Crown itself took on the three islands with the largest native populations. Its troops landed at La Isleta on Gran Canaria in 1478 and founded El Real de Las Palmas, today’s old town of the capital. La Palma fell next, and Castile gained control of Tenerife in 1496, though the Guanches there kept resisting for years.^[7] The two kinds of conquest left two kinds of island: Gran Canaria, Tenerife and La Palma belonged to the crown, while Lanzarote, Fuerteventura, La Gomera and El Hierro stayed under private lords until the early 19th century.^[2]

Seven islands, two rivals

For three centuries each island was a single municipality with its own council, the cabildo. The only bodies that covered the whole archipelago were the high court, the bishopric and the captaincy-general.^[2] Castile also gave the islands tax and trade privileges and kept them out of the trade monopolies that applied in the rest of Spain. A free-ports decree of 1852 became law in 1870, and a law of 1900 widened it.^[2]

The leaders of Gran Canaria and Tenerife spent decades competing for control, a quarrel known as the pleito insular. A law of 1912 had created a council for each island, but the single provincial council for all the Canaries could barely work after 1913, and Gran Canaria wanted it abolished.^[8] Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship abolished the provincial council in 1925, and on 21 September 1927 a decree split the islands into two provinces.^[8] Las Palmas took Gran Canaria, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura; Santa Cruz de Tenerife took Tenerife, La Palma, La Gomera and El Hierro.^[9]

Autonomy with two capitals

After Spain’s 1978 constitution, the Statute of Autonomy of 10 August 1982 made the Canaries an autonomous community. It split the capital between Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, with the president’s seat moving between them from one parliament to the next and the vice-president always in the other city. The parliament sits in Santa Cruz.^[1]

A new statute in 2018 kept that compromise.^[2] It calls the islands an Atlantic archipelago that governs itself “as a nationality”, names La Graciosa as an island alongside the seven with their own councils, and draws a perimeter around the archipelago whose enclosed sea it calls “Canarian waters”.^[2] Until a new electoral law passes, the parliament has 70 seats: 61 elected island by island, from 15 each for Tenerife and Gran Canaria down to 3 for El Hierro, and 9 for the whole region.^[2]

“La capitalidad de Canarias se fija compartidamente en las ciudades de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria y Santa Cruz de Tenerife.”^[2]

In Europe, but not quite

The EU treats the Canaries as one of its nine outermost regions, remote territories that get special treatment under Article 349 of the EU treaty.^[5] They are inside the EU and its customs union, but EU VAT and excise rules do not apply there.^[6] The islands have their own indirect tax instead, the IGIC.^[2]

The islands also keep a language found nowhere else: the Silbo Gomero, a whistled form of Spanish used on La Gomera and taught in its schools since 1999. UNESCO added it to its intangible heritage list in 2009.^[10]