For centuries, southern Gran Canaria was a remote, almost secret landscape. San Bartolomé, Fataga, or Mogán were not included on the trade routes of Puerto de La Luz or on the official itineraries of enlightened travelers. But some 19th-century European naturalists, geologists, and explorers did venture across its cliffs and left behind a testament to an arid, rugged, and beautiful territory that survived only thanks to peasant ingenuity and the persistence of water.
One of the first Europeans to describe Gran Canaria from a scientific perspective was Georg Hartung, a German geologist who explored the islands between 1853 and 1854. In his Beiträge zur Geologie der Canarischen Inseln (1857), he noted the contrast between the humid north and the dry south, and highlighted how the Tirajana and Fataga ravines were “deeply eroded and inhabited by a population that lives almost as in pre-Hispanic times.” Hartung was impressed by the geological structure of the great southern canyons and the adaptation of the peasantry to such rugged terrain.
Also in the 1835th century, the French physician and botanist Sabin Berthelot, co-author of the monumental Histoire Naturelle des Îles Canaries (1850–XNUMX), described the southern valleys as “volcanic skeletons covered by the tenderness of almond trees in bloom.” Although his work focused more on Tenerife, Berthelot traveled several times to Gran Canaria and collected testimonies from shepherds in Tunte and farmers in the Caldera de Tirajana. He highlighted the existence of communal irrigation ditches dug into the volcanic rock, direct heirs of the indigenous hydraulic system.
Well into the 1909th century, the German ethnographer Erwin Hübner, in his Studies on Canarian Popular Culture (XNUMX), recounted a journey on foot from Santa Lucía to Mogán, describing how the inhabitants of Fataga stored overripe figs in cool caves and how in Mogán tomatoes were grown next to almost deserted ravines. “Water is measured with sundials, and ownership of irrigation is held in higher regard than ownership of land,” he noted.
For his part, the French writer René Verneau, who lived in the Canary Islands between 1884 and 1887, also traveled through the south of the island as part of his research on the Guanche population. Although he focused his work on burial mounds and the La Audiencia cave (Temisas), Verneau was one of the first to document the existence of warehouses (caves used to store grain) in the cliffs of Mogán, and observed how many of the southern inhabitants continued to rely almost exclusively on gofio as their mainstay.
In the late 20s, the first tourist chronicles began to appear. In 1929, English journalist Edward Hutton, author of Canary Islands (Methuen & Co., 1929), wrote that “the Mogán ravine is one of the island's most extraordinary landscapes: arid, vertical, Martian red... and yet dotted with hidden gardens where mango trees and bougainvillea flourish.”
Until the opening of the Mogán highway in 1931, access to these areas was exclusively by mule or on foot. The economy was based on self-sufficiency, winter tomato exports, and the use of communal water distribution systems. There was no electricity grid or comprehensive schooling. Illiteracy was prevalent, but so was self-sufficiency.
These travelers, many of them scientists, didn't come looking for beaches or mild climates. What they found was something else: a rural culture deeply adapted to scarcity, an ancestral ecological balance, and a way of life that, although impoverished, preserved structures of solidarity and community knowledge that have disappeared today.
On the cliffs where René Verneau observed communal caves, tourist apartments now stand. The agricultural terraces that impressed Hübner have been replaced by hotels and avenues. But in every curve of the old Fataga road or in every dry irrigation ditch in Mogán, there remains the echo of that secret Gran Canaria that travelers, between awe and respect, were able to capture.
