Short History of Gran Canaria

There is a lot of myth and legend about the early history of the Canary Islands and some even believed them to be the lost land of Atlantis. To others they were also known as the ‘Fortunate Islands’ clinging to the edge of the world where people had no sorrows.

It is believed that Gran Canaria was already populated at around 500 B.C., although there are several theories for the origins of its early inhabitants. But what seems to be confirmed is that Gran Canaria’s natives, known as Guanches, originally came from North Africa and that they were descendants of the Berber people. The Guanches lived on a very primitive level – witnessed in their unsophisticated tools and weapons found on the island – mostly in caves and under rock spurs. The most civilised achievement were earthenware recipients modelled without a potter’s wheel.

After the fall of the Roman Empire Europe forgot the Canary Islands for almost 1000 years and until the rediscovery of the Canaries by Mediterranean sailors in the early 14^th century, the almost 30.000 Guanches on the island of Gran Canaria lived a peaceful life. Then this changed drastically, as throughout the 14^th century the Italians, Portuguese and Catalans sent their ships to the islands to bring back slaves and furs to their countries. In the beginning of the 15^th century the rapid process of the conquest of the islands began.

On Gran Canaria, the Guanches resisted fiercely to the Spanish invasion but in 1483 Pedro de Vera completed the conquest that Juan Réjon had started five years earlier. Many Guanches were killed or made suicide rather than surrender to the Spanish. Those who survived were forced into slavery and to convert to Christianity and soon started to die out.

Contacts with the New World (because of the high emigration to Latin America due to collapses of local industries), where Cuba had won freedom from Spain in 1898, led to calls for Canary independence but most people simply wanted the division of the archipelago into two separate provinces (Gran Canaria and Tenerife), which eventually came about in 1927.