Human Occupation of a Small Volcanic Island

Abstract

El Hierro has had an evolution in terms of its population in close relation to a series of historical, economic and social transformations that have left an important mark on the landscape. In general terms, we could affirm that the evolution and distribution of the population has been conditioned by economic cycles and modes of production, which have worked in accordance with the interest of local and regional elites.

1 Pre-European Population and Settlement

The first Bimbache or Bimbape (names given to indigenous people) settlement on the island of El Hierro is based on the speculative and hypothetical assumptions that characterize the scientific studies of the Canary Islands’ prehistory. Thus, despite the advances in archaeological science, there are still more questions than answers regarding the islands’ early pre-European settlers.

We can, however, affirm the North African character of El Hierro’s first settlers, without specifying how and why they settled on the island. The first settlement was around 338 A.D. with a possible date range of between 212 A.D. and 489 A.D. (Jiménez Gómez 1993). This population survived by rearing small livestock, rudimentary cereal cultivation and other farming and fishing activities, all in an environmental context characterized by a small territory and limited water and soil resources. These natural circumstances together with the pirate raids in search of slaves in the years prior to their conquest were a serious limitation for El Hierro’s population development.

Determining the exact population size for this period is a challenging archaeological task. While awaiting advances in the field, ethnohistorical sources can, however, provide us with some data, starting with the chronicles of the friars who accompanied the first expeditions to conquer the islands at the beginning of the fifteenth century led by Jean de Béthencourt and Gadifer de La Salle. This source, for a period immediately prior to the first European invasion, limits itself to saying that on El Hierro “few people remain” (Le Canarien 1959), in clear reference to the abundant slave raids to which the island had been subjected for a long time.

But how many people could we be talking about? In the absence of exact sources, estimates point to a potential Bimbache population prior to the conquest of between 500 and 1400 inhabitants (Macías Hernández 1992; Junyent 2013), who were organized in dispersed villages without constituting permanent settlements, taking advantage of the different and seasonal bioclimatic periods to obtain pastures and access to water. From very early on, a fundamental characteristic of these settlements was their periodic vertical and horizontal seasonal mobility.

2 The European Occupation

From 1404 to 1405, after the arrival of the troops of Béthencourt and La Salle, the first permanent settlement of Europeans on El Hierro occurred.¹ It was made up of 120 inhabitants (Le Canarien 1959), French and Flemish, to whom López de Ulloa in 1646 also added Castilians and indigenous people from the neighbouring island of La Gomera (Morales 1978).

During this first stage, also called the Norman stage due to the origin of the conquerors, to avoid the departure of the small number of settlers, the Lord exempted them from paying rents and gave them land and caves to give them a fair chance of survival. In an extensive and imprecise area, this first settlement was located at 600 m asl. in the humid midlands, in the northwest of the island, in a large area that the ancient local people called Amoco. A place that provided the settlers with land, caves and pastures, as well as the possibility of obtaining water through the use of so-called “horizontal rain”, which they collected in small ponds.² This according to the Bimbache tradition involved the miraculous or saintly tree from which water flowed and which the locals called Garoé.³

The Norman influence on El Hierro was slight. They were limited for decades to leaving symbolic evidence of their presence, such as the practice of a subsistence economy, as well as developing small extractive activities, on an island, at that time, still not under absolute control by the European settlers. It was not until the incursion of Fernán Peraza the Elder and Captain Juan Machín (1449–1450) that the island was finally pacified, and its true colonization began.

The settlers who arrived on El Hierro from the second half of the fifteenth century onwards proposed a different model to their Norman predecessors. From the simple occupation and extractive strategies of the Normans, they moved to a productive economy. However, in their strategies, the colonists were limited at that time by insurmountable environmental obstacles: the island had no soil and no water, fundamental resources for the implementation of an agro-export economy represented at that time by sugar cane. This condition not only prevented new settlements of colonists, but also incited the desertion of the existing ones, to the point of the Lord prohibiting the departure of those established there to Gran Canaria at a time when this island began to be colonized (Lobo 2019). Hence, this recolonization meant, in its first phase, only modest population growth, because along with the arrival of troops, there was also the departure of many others.

The Castilian reconquest did not mean a break with the indigenous economic model, which was maintained until at least the second half of the sixteenth century with the pre-Hispanic livestock rearing as the dominant productive activity. This provided income for the Lordship in addition to those derived from forestry exploitation (wood and pitch) and the seasonal harvesting of dye plants, such as orchilla and pastel grass, the latter was already being commercialised in the sixteenth century.

And what happened to the indigenous society? Colonization came at a high cultural and human cost. European pathogens, slavery and fighting depleted the local inhabitants’ forces. The Bimbache chiefs surrendered, and these and some indigenous people took Castilian names and customs. A mostly male colonization meant the unions with local women led to a mestizo and multicultural population. In this way El Hierro, Finisterre and other frontier lands, received old and new Christians, Jews, free men and a few slaves, who coexisted and merged with the free Bimbache and who settled in cattle-raising areas. However, in this mixture, indigenous knowledge about the environment survived. Indeed, its use has been decisive for the survival and subsequent food production of the island, as well as its voices, phrases and some native socio-cultural elements that still remain in the documentary and oral memory of the island. At the end of the fourteenth century, El Hierro had a population of eighty neighbours (Bernáldez 1962), around 300 inhabitants. A figure that partially coincides with the forty fathers of a family or 200 inhabitants that Bartolomé García del Castillo would point out centuries later when referring to the population at this time (García del Castillo 2003).

3 The Partition and Its Demographic Influence

The development of sugar cultivation was ecologically impossible, and the island faced a bleak prospect of colonization. Therefore, as an incentive and with the aim of obtaining a few hundred doblones from their production, the Lords ceded in the 1500s a part of their private domains: land, water, caves, beehives, etc., on the condition that they were put into production over a period of time, charging little or no rent for their use and only quintos (one fifth of the value of produce) and custom duties on the trade of some products: wool, cheese, fish, barley and small livestock. These conditions attracted the population and a small group that benefited from the partition consolidated themselves as an insular ruling class with significant political power and social ascendancy.

A dry-stone wall, an albarrada, separated land into private and communal uses. Most of the island was initially outside the albarradas for common use, but soon (1602) the first usurpations of this communal patrimony took place. In 1637, land outside an albarrada (Nisdafe) was divided into two strips in which livestock use alternated with crops during fallow periods, in an attempt to end a historical struggle between farmers and herders over the areas of communal use.

These partitions produced a late repopulation. At the end of the sixteenth century (1585), the island’s population increased from 300 inhabitants to 1300 inhabitants (Marco 1943). Its main population centre (Valverde) was established in the aforementioned area known as Amoco, which became the main political and religious centre of the island, as well as the residence of the main beneficiaries of the land distributions. In 1590, Valverde had 250 houses (Torriani 1959) and according to Abreu Galindo at the end of the sixteenth century it had “more than a thousand people” (de Abreu Galindo Fr 1940). This number could well represent practically the whole island’s population.

From Valverde, at the end of the sixteenth century, a branch of small settlements around the Nisdafe plateau began to consolidate. To the north and northwest, taking advantage of the supply of water, pasture and firewood, new livestock and agricultural enclaves appeared. To the southwest, the area of San Andrés de Azofa, was a cereal and livestock farming area, with more than a hundred neighbours benefiting from the Açof spring, the pools of water and the nearby pastures. The rest of the island in the sixteenth century was still sparsely inhabited. The south and southwest, with less soil and scarce water, remained as a pasture area with some semi-permanent pastoral enclaves. This is the case of La Dehesa, home since 1546 to the patron saint of the island, the Virgen de los Reyes.

4 Demographic Effects of the Canary Islands Economic Model on the island's Population

The bonanza of agro-export production in the Archipelago during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries relaunched the economy on other islands. Many areas were turned over to sugar cane and vine cultivation. The commercial fleets that were provisioned in the Canary Islands and the military defences of the archipelago required agricultural and livestock products for their basic needs and El Hierro, together with other islands, provided these. Cereals (barley) and pulses were sent from El Hierro to Tenerife and Gran Canaria once internal demand had been satisfied. As the dominant economic activity, livestock farming was of considerable importance, providing meat, cheese and cured meats, as well as live cattle. Already in the seventeenth century, there was no shortage of Herreño wine and brandy on the islands with agro-exporting economies.

In this context, the population increased due to mainland and regional immigration. The Census of the Inquisition of 1605 indicated that Valverde had already reached 250 neighbours, around 1000 inhabitants (Lobo Cabrera 1984–1986). As the population increased, it expanded towards the north, where cattle rearing alternated with agriculture, and with disperse populations developing in the surrounding areas (Rumeu 1947).

The Synods of the Bishop Cámara and Murga in 1629 indicated a population of 600 neighbours, more than 2700 inhabitants (Diaz and Rodríguez 1987). This was significant population growth, a consequence of new arrivals in the early decades of the seventeenth century. At that time, the island was growing at a rate of 1.05% (1590–1680), a figure well above the Archipelago average of 0.73% (Macías Hernández 1988). Bishop Bartolomé García Jiménez’s census (1676–1689) confirmed these rising figures, with numbers of around 3500–4000 inhabitants by the end of the seventeenth century, and even reaching 4500 inhabitants in 1680 (Sánchez Herrero 1975).

Díaz Padilla and Rodríguez Yanes (1990) using the parish registers of 1680 showed how Valverde was the main population centre with 939 inhabitants in that century. It was the home of the landowning class, with a significant number of two-storey houses. The area that borders Nisdafe to the north and northwest and which sourced Barlovento or Las Vegas, already showed outstanding production linked to areas of new agricultural land and pastoral activity. The region of Barlovento had at this time more population than Valverde, 1078 people spread in an increasingly disperse way from the town to the border with the Valley of El Golfo. The dwellings in this area were made of stone and tiles, yet there was no population nucleus. The rest of the island was still sparsely populated with 1131 inhabitants divided between San Andrés de Asofa with 758 and El Pinal de S. Antonio (El Pinar), which by this time was reclaiming land from the mountains and had 318 inhabitants. El Golfo was still far from being the prosperous population that it would be in the future. Most of the island was inhabited by a pastoral and transhumant population, with only a few straw houses and cave dwellings, and there was only one house in the whole valley of El Golfo. Another aspect of interest was that most of these dwellings were without doors, testifying to their temporary nature and indicating seasonal residence changes in order to obtain a balance in the production of basic necessities.

5 Economic Crises and Their Impact on the Population of El Hierro

In the mid-late seventeenth century, the population dynamics changed from rapid growth due to immigration to only slight growth or stagnation based on natural population dynamics and a relative emigration effect. This situation coincided with locust plagues (1698, 1703 and 1726); hurricanes and storms (the Virgin of Los Reyes was named patron saint in 1643 after an intense period of these events); as well as with abundant droughts (from 1741, it was decided to move the island’s patron saint every four years from her hermitage in La Dehesa to Valverde because of the lack of rain). All these natural setbacks caused a decrease in agricultural and livestock production, food shortages and poverty among the population (Hernández 1983).

In addition to these frequent natural setbacks (the people of El Hierro, the Herreños speak of “times of virados” to indicate such hardships.

There was also a series of structural factors of a socio-economic nature. From 1640 onwards, a commercial and productive crisis began in the Canary Islands that would intensify when England began to impose protectionist restrictions on the marketing of Canary Island wine, triggering in the following century the ruin of this agro-export and with it the poverty of the Archipelago. In this context, the main islands stopped buying food products from the other islands due to payment difficulties and above all due to the increase in land devoted to subsistence agriculture in these islands. The fall in demand for food products in the inter-island market (cereals, wine and spirits, fruit, livestock and livestock products) was a blow for El Hierro’s economy, which was so dependent on the inter-island market in commercial terms.

The reaction of the large landowners to this critical situation was to make use of their local power and expropriate communal areas (forests, pastures and wastelands) in order to increase their income. This added pressure on small peasants and landless tenants, both in working conditions and in the overpayment of rents, which was used to balance the income lost due to the contraction of the agro-export market. However, an intense social conflict broke out, involving the large landowners who benefited from the manorial distributions and the small landowners, in many cases subsistence smallholders, who even with land, progressively became sharecroppers for the former due to the low profitability of their possessions, and of course the sharecroppers and day labourers without land found that their harsh working conditions worsened. There was also the confrontation of the large landowners with the Lord of the island to avoid the payment of taxes and for definitive control of the island. This loss of communal areas also meant the total or, in some cases, partial incorporation of agricultural activity in pastoral areas. For example, in 1700 free grazing was prohibited in El Golfo, leaving this activity limited to marginal areas, such as Pie de Risco, Guinea and Los Llanillos (Díaz Padilla and Rodríguez Yanes 1990).

These natural circumstances and, above all, the disappearance of traditional forms of production due to the privatization of communal land, the harsh social and labour situation and the surplus of labour due to the non-existence of alternatives on the island, led small landowners and day labourers to emigrate to the main Islands or to Latin America. According to Urtusáustegui (1779): “in Tenerife and America, there are swarms of Herreños though they would not have left the island unless forced by their needs” (Lorenzo 1983). Viera, years earlier, spoke of “a large number of young men, and even young women, who annually expatriated, either to work on the other islands, especially Tenerife, or to emigrate to America” (de Viera Clavijo 1772–1783).

This migratory process and subsistence crisis, despite high birth rates, led to stagnation or only slight population increases that continued until the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1706 the Vicar and Commissary of the Holy Office, Juan García Melo (García de Melo 1706) pointed out that Valverde had 240 neighbours (1104 inhabitants), Barlovento 265 neighbours (1219 inhabitants), with a notable number in San Pedro del Mocanal, while Asofa-El Pinar, in which the pago de San Andrés stood out, had 259 neighbours (1000 inhabitants).

El Golfo was the only area with a growing population (55 inhabitants). The reason for this increase was, according to the source, “that there were vineyards”. This activity became almost a monoculture in association with fruit trees after the disappearance of livestock in communal areas of the Valley. In an attempt to maintain Canary Island wine as a commercial product, from 1700 onwards, a regional commitment was made to produce wine at lower costs, opening up new wine-growing areas. El Golfo in El Hierro fulfilled perfectly this option, and from the eighteenth century onwards the wine-growing activity in the valley consolidated with a corresponding seasonal population, and the chapel of Our Lady of Candelaria was built as a parish church in 1776.

The other alternative to the regional wine decline was to produce spirits, with a higher value than wine, in which El Golfo also participated. Hence, sources (1785) indicate: “the estate of El Golfo, where a lot of wine is produced “de vidueño” which they use to produce the best quality brandy […], which is bought by the merchants of Tenerife and sold to America” (Darias 1943).

In 1719, the island had, according to reports from the Islands’ bishops to Rome, 3,080 people (Escribano 1987). Between 1743 and 1744, Bishop Juan Francisco Guillén Isso in his visit to El Hierro noted that the island had 3687 inhabitants, noting that most of the houses were earthen and covered with straw (Guillén Isso 1743–1744). In 1768, the Census of Aranda indicated a population of 4022 (Jiménez de Gregorio 1968). The eighteenth century ended with the Floridablanca Census (1787) that counted 4040 people living on the island (Jiménez de Gregorio 1968).

Since the seventeenth century, practically all the island's settlements had been established, as well as their traditional delimitations or districts: the Villa de Valverde; El Barrio (also called Barlovento or El Norte), Asofa, El Golfo and El Pinar. The statistics of the Marquis of Tabalosos in 1776 (Rumeu de Armas 1943) and Viera y Clavijo in his News (1772–1783) gave quite a complete picture of the settlements. Valverde maintained its insular centrality as an agricultural and administrative centre. The extension of the cultivation and pasture areas to the north consolidated the settlements already existing in this area, expanding with secondary settlements. To the southwest, the intensification of agricultural and livestock farming led to the growth of Asofa. San Antón del Pinal (El Pinar) also increased its agricultural land with fig trees, which helped the main settlements grow. In addition, there was “the very fertile Gulf Valley” (de Viera Clavijo 1772–1783), which saw its settlements grow beyond the traditional ones in the eastern half of the island with others to the centre and west.

During the nineteenth century, the population of El Hierro grew very little. In 1802, the island had 4006 inhabitants (Arbelo 1990), and it did not exceed 5000 inhabitants until the middle of that century (see Fig. 1). The definitive ruin of regional wine production, and the return to the original situation of cultivation to supply the domestic market was a serious setback due to competition among the wines and spirits of the island. This had a notable influence on the population development.

Fig. 1

Source Itac, Self-elaboration

Demographic evolution of El Hierro in the pre-statistical stage.

From a social point of view, the tensions between El Hierro’s oligarchy and the Lordship came to an end with the disappearance of the latter in 1812. Almost immediately, a hegemonic struggle began between factions of the ruling class, who alternatively exercised dominance over the rest of the population, thanks to the relationships of dependence that bound the peasants to them (administrative favours, etc.). This intensified the pressure on the peasant population and small landowners, with the expropriation and auctioning of more communal land. This created a situation of overexploitation, which when it coincided with regional crises or periods of drought or plagues made existence extremely arduous, pushing people to emigrate.

Expansions and contractions of El Hierro’s economy and emigration explain the population figures in the twentieth century. The censuses of 1900 and 1910 indicate growth rates well below the regional average, synonymous with poverty and emigration. This also coincided with the establishment of a free port regime and the abolition of protective tariffs on local agricultural production, all very negative circumstances for commercial production on the island.

This migratory trend came to a halt in 1910. In this decade, the number of emigrants from the Canary Islands to Cuba exceeded the employment forecasts, resulting in a shortage of workers and social conflict. The Cuban government reacted and only took in seasonal workers. This meant the return of the local population with money to El Hierro, who then invested in land, contributing to a small economic improvement, which helped increase the population to 8,344 inhabitants according to the 1920 census (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2

Map of the evolution of settlement on El Hierro. Self-elaboration

From this decade onwards, sugar prices fell sharply, the Cuban banking collapse took place and in 1929 the well-known world depression occurred. This combination of events put an end to Cuba as an ideal destination for any unfortunate Herreños. In the Canary Islands, the economic reactivation, after the strong depression caused by the First World War, was halted by the effects of the Great Depression. The result was the return of many of the local population to El Hierro with the money obtained during their work in South America only to find a complex situation there, as the archipelago was also affected by this global crisis.

In the 1930s, the protectionist measures adopted by the main consumer countries of what was then the main export product (bananas) and the decrease in port activity, once again generated a serious setback for the island’s economy, which had its sources of financing closely related to the markets of the urban, port and commercial centres of the main islands. This situation was conducive to mass emigration, but this time there was no exodus. The Cuban option was closed and Venezuela, the next preferred destination, was still an incipient agricultural economy with laws against immigration. Without destinations and with substantial domestic agricultural production, the island of El Hierro increased its population extraordinarily, from 8344 inhabitants in 1920 to 9500 and 9810 in 1930 and 1940, respectively. These increases occurred without changes in its socio-productive structure and with only the use of public works as a mechanism to combat unemployment.

6 The Diaspora

El Hierro began the 1940s suffering from a series of setbacks for its development. On the one hand, population growth had generated a volume of workers that could not be absorbed by the island's economic system, even more so when public works in this decade were reduced to the point of their virtual disappearance. In addition, there was political repression, the absence of infrastructures and persistence of traditional forms of farming with low yields, which depended on the overexploitation of labour as the main productive force. Moreover, from a regional point of view, the economic and commercial restructuring that occurred because of the weakening of the free port regime was a severe blow to the urban economies of the main islands: the main consumers of the El Hierro’s agricultural products. Nor was the weather favourable during these years, and the island was subjected to one of the greatest droughts of the twentieth century, the so-called “Seca del 48”. This whole panorama plunged El Hierro into a situation of mere subsistence and its only recourse was emigration. Due to the close historical links, together with the now attractive Venezuelan economic situation, once again many Herreños began to think of America as a saviour for their poor situation.

However, emigration was not easy. The Venezuelan demand for labour and the economic needs of the Herreños clashed with the difficult circumstances of the post-civil war and the Second World War. The rupture of diplomatic relations between Spain and Venezuela, as well as the de facto ban on foreign emigration by the Franco regime left clandestine emigration as the only option. Fortunately, from 1948, with recognition of Franco's dictatorship by the Venezuelan dictatorship, emigration was legalized, but now there were other drawbacks: obtaining a passport, exit permit, bank deposit and especially the price of the ticket, a fortune for the peasants of El Hierro. Hence, the illegal option remained as the only possible one for many of the island’s population.

When, in 1950, it was decreed that emigration was free of charge and the obligation to present economic certifications, letters of call and work contracts were waived, a situation of true diaspora was produced. In three decades (1940–1970), the island lost more than 3000 inhabitants and registered negative migratory balances higher than the provincial average (see Table 1). Young men at first, and from 1950 onwards with the Regrouping Plan, entire families left for Venezuela. As a result, El Hierro became an ageing island with many empty houses.

Table 1 Distribution of the population by county (1940–1970)

7 Changing Trends

However, from the 1970s onwards, there was a new demographic trend because of three fundamental factors: the development and use of irrigated agriculture in the Valley of El Golfo, the flow of state capital into public works and the progressive tertiarization of the population. These changes produced a transformation in El Hierro’s labour structure, from the dominance of sharecropping relationships to mostly salaried forms of labour, either in irrigated agriculture or the service sector. In this way, as the economic situation changes, the traditional layout of human settlements, reflecting a socio-economic organisation that was becoming obsolete, was broken down.

The midland zones of the island, historically agricultural and livestock farming areas and the location of its main centres, underwent a profound change. The populations located there have declined and aged, while the Valley of El Golfo has gained demographic importance, as it increasingly becomes a centre of prosperous agricultural exploitations. This economically more active area may replace Valverde in importance, the latter retaining some relevance as an administrative centre. From the end of the 1980s, until the segregation of El Pinar as a municipality in 2007, Frontera became the most populated municipality on the island (Table 2).

Table 2 Distribution of the population by districts (1981–2011)

Another characteristic of the new population situation has been the extraordinary growth of historically unpopulated coastal areas, which since the mid-1970s have become vital points for the service economy (La Restinga) or for second homes (the coast between El Tamaduste and Timijiraque, in Valverde) (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3

Panoramic view of El Golfo

Overall, the main contemporary demographic event on the island has been the intensification of the immigration process due to the difficult and convulsive economic and political situation in Venezuela. The return of people who once left the island, together with second or third generations of those who left, to which must be added a relative increase in resident Europeans (Germans and Italians) are responsible for the continuous population increase in the last third of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first century, which means El Hierro’s population now stands at more than 11,000 inhabitants.