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| Edge of the Old World? San Sebastian, La Gomera |
Summer is over and in Somerville Senior
Common Room, academics are swapping tales of holidays. Many colleagues have
holidayed in cultural-historic hotspots, such as Central Italy, and so I wonder
if they will wince when I admit to spending a fortnight in Tenerife – an island
associated, in the UK, with loud mega-resorts, high-rise hotels, beaches full
of British tourists, and not much else. The lavish modern water parks and zoos
built on the island, consistently rated as its top attractions, only reinforce
the impression that there is nothing really to see on this remote Canarian
isle. Bucket-and-spade tourism dominates, in an archipelago whose economy has a
long track-record of dependence on just one industry (wine, cochineal,
sunseekers).
It is no real secret that there is more
to the island – travel journalists regularly write features on
‘hidden Tenerife’, its live volcanos, pre-historic fauna, mountain villages.
What interests me, however, is the way in which Tenerife and its tourism
industry shrug off the past, an island refusing to wear its history on its
sleeve. Yet historians of the late medieval and Renaissance worlds have long stressed how important the Canary Islands are – from John Merriman in the
1960s to Felipe Armandez Armesto in the 1980s, the archipelago has been
described as a laboratory of empire, the place where Europeans learnt to
colonise from the 14C, a stepping stone between medieval Christendom and global
modernity.
Taking the ferry to the island of La
Gomera, day-trippers from Tenerife dock in the tiny port of San Sebastian, cuboid houses perched on the mountainside. This is where Columbus provisioned
his fleet, the port from which he set sail into the blue yonder in 1492. San
Sebastian still feels remote, on the very edge of the Old World. When the Fred
Olsen trimaran navigates the choppy channel between La Gomera and Tenerife, you
can peer west through the salt-greased window and think of the Santa Maria sailing these same waters.
All over the Canaries, you can eat papas arrugadas, rare ‘heritage’ varieties of potatoes, genetically important
because these are potato strains first brought to Europe from the Americas
in the 16C, preserved in their original form in this archipelago. In colonial
towns in misty northern Tenerife, such as Oratava, you can visit the
three-storied 17C town-houses of people who grew rich on trade, because the
Canaries were an essential staging post for Spanish maritime traffic between
Europe and the Americas in the early modern centuries.
There is more than enough material,
to build among the hotels of Tenerife, a magnificent Museum of the Canaries, of
Atlantic History, or of the Americas, to address the richness, complexities,
controversies and myths of Iberia’s global empires – launched from these very
shores. So Tenerife is a useful reminder that however historically significant
or evocative a place may seem to scholars, 15,000,000 people a year fly to the
Canary Islands for quite different reasons. After all, who needs history, or a
heritage industry, in order to prosper if you have a really hot beach?
