That the south of Gran Canaria has welcomed the most crazy ideas throughout its existence comes from afar. It was the year 1786 when Cristóbal Vicente Mújica requested licenses in Las Palmas to capture whales in Maspalomas. The area was very rich in fishing because since 1660 Maspalomas and Juan Grande hosted, according to Viera y Clavijo, and as confirmed by the military engineer Miguel Hermosilla in 1779, the fishing and salt deposits in the south of Gran Canaria to load on ships, About 20 were the Canarian fleet, in the Port of Gando. It happened that Las Palmas gave the green light to Mújica in 1795 to hunt whales for six years, trying at the same time to have factories on free land in La Isleta for the processing of merchandise. From Madrid then a permit arrives in the form of a Royal Provision of the Council of Castile of July 7, 1786, which had ordered the Royal Court to award Cristóbal Vicente Mújica the Isleta for the establishment of a factory for fishing. In 1797 they took away his license for flagging.
The professor of Modern History at the ULPGC, Juan Manuel Santana, points out that "all these whaling projects were so many failures, it was the story of a frustration, which only injured several whales and captured a few calves, with a completely deficient investment, which was definitively abandoned and collided with various interests, to which were added the technical and financial difficulties and the pitfalls of improvisation. It was once again, part of the economic dirigisme typical of enlightened policies, which attempted to support whaling with measures that went from top to bottom.
For the whaling operation there are papers signed dated 1803 urging licensing because Mújica had ordered the construction of four whaling ships and developed three fishing campaigns. And do you know what the shipowner really intended? loot Doramas wood, which was a good forest, adding up to 170 bushels of tree felling. In Las Palmas, on April 8, 1808, the lands located between Maspalomas and Arguineguín were declared vacant because they were lands not suitable for breadmaking by the Corregidor of the Court of Las Palmas. In 1817 and 1818, Mújica again requested land in La Isleta to capture whales in Maspalomas during the spring in the south of Gran Canaria, but he was never able to make it effective. Cristóbal Mújica in his will executed on October 20, 1831 continued to claim his rights and included among his assets the bushels that had been granted to him. The lands that he requested yielded much more as agricultural production than the benefit of that fishing illusion.
