It could have been a Canarian, it could have been a Canarian soldier in the orbit of Simón Bolívar with the surname Maspalomas who would spread it throughout Latin America. This story reached Maspalomas24H and, from there, the investigations began: Is Maspalomas a surname? And yes. It is. In the INE database in Spain there is no one, but in the rest of the world there are loads: throughout the world there are 139.067 people with the surname Maspalomas, most of them in Latin America. In the United States there are 1.503 records with the surname Maspalomas and six family trees registered with civil entities. In Gran Canaria through traffic fines published in the BOE where we have found people with the second name Maspalomas.
The above is due to a statue in Bogotá in homage to Juan Maspalomas. This hero, whose name and surname are so close to the south of Gran Canaria and who is immortalized in Bogotá, has nothing to do with any war. He was a worker in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Bogotá. It is known that Juan Maspalomas became part of the modern history of the Colombian capital because one day he decided to help a woman in a supermarket next to his house.
Regarding the story of Juan Maspalomas, it is known that he died at the age of 42 without family in Bogotá. He performed a heroic act by defending a woman from rape. The woman escaped but he was shot dead. In this way, Juan would have remained as one more hidden statistic in the homicide rate of 26,8 (per 100.000) that Usme had in 2017. The victim, Mariela Fernández, remembers that "the great Juan Maspalomas saved my life and defended me and, in a broader sense, the rights that we have as women." And that is why there is a statue of Juan Maspalomas in Colombia. "If my daughters and the children from their school come to this humble square and see the statue of Juan, they learn about his history by reading the plaque. (...) I don't understand why so many tributes are paid to our founding fathers, politicians and religious figures. We seem to forget that the success of us, human beings, lies in the smallest acts of any individual like that of Juan Maspalomas."
