There are places in southern Gran Canaria where history, that capricious lady, blends with the murmur of legend, and piety with the most pagan revelry. One such enclave is Pinar de Santiago, today a haven among young pine trees and clean air. But beneath this appearance of tranquility lies a chronicle of picaresque proportions, a tale where faith and debauchery joined hands so enthusiastically that they forced the Apostle Saint James himself to flee. Here, gentlemen, in this corner of San Bartolomé de Tirajana, the bacchanals were not a rumor, but a sentence.
The fable, that lifeblood that nourishes popular memory, tells of Galician sailors. Caught in a storm that made your skin crawl, they entrusted themselves to the Apostle, promising a shrine if he saved their skin. And salvation came, they say, with the sight of the Cumbres de Tirajana and the landing in Arguineguín. They climbed, image in tow, to the Morro or Lomito de Santiago, where devotion erected a shrine of stone and mud. That image, Santiago "el Chico," now Tunte's companion, returns every July on pilgrimage, a reminder of its former location. But the irony, like good gin, is old: this pilgrimage is the echo of an exile brought on by its own devotees.
The hermitage, which survived several reconstructions until the mid-1850th century, was a meeting place, yes, but with excessive joy. The height of the scandal came in XNUMX. Bishop Codina, a man of order and pious spirit, heard gossip from the mountains: the sanctuary had become an epicenter of "bacchanals, pagan festivals." Imagine the scene: people "on the backs of beasts" inside the sacred precinct, wine flowing, revelry unbridled. What was brewing there wasn't devotion, but an explosion of life itself, untouched by any liturgy.
There, in Las Palmas, always so restrictive with the south of Gran Canaria, it couldn't fail. The ecclesiastical hierarchy, of course, couldn't look the other way. The chaos was such that the Bishop had no choice but to order the parish priest to immediately move the image to the church of San Bartolomé. The Apostle had to leave the hill where he had been venerated to escape the hustle and bustle, the sin, and, perhaps, the rum and honey fumes, on the orders of Bishop Codina.
But behind the veil of moralizing, there is always a more mundane, more prosaic truth. Historians, who don't mince words, sense it: economic control. The offerings to the Apostle were substantial, the hermitage's coffers "generous." But a hermitage at the top of the mountain, isolated, was a bottomless pit for uncontrolled spending. Controlling the funds was "quite difficult," and looting was "very frequent." The transfer of the image was not only a matter of purifying souls, but also of securing the coins. The Apostle, as a good patron saint, also generated profits, and those profits, in the hands of the clergy, would always be safer away from the revelry and the profiteers.
Despite the dances and excesses, documented history anchors us to a fascinating reality. The hermitage, with its humble construction, already existed before 1589. María de Morales, a resident of Telde, recorded it in her will of April 1589: her father, Diego de Morales, "built the church of Lord Santiago." And the place, even before the hermitage, already had a name. Since the 1542th century, it was known as "Valle de Santiago." Diego de Morales, in land applications from 1543 and 1783, refers to it as "valley, seat of Santiago." Ah, the nuance of words. "Sede," the RAE (Royal Spanish Academy of Spain) reminds us in XNUMX, is not only a seat, but also "the dignity of a Bishop... Supreme Pontiff... Roman Catholic Apostolic." That is, a high degree of religious spirituality. The place, therefore, had a sacred imprint, an implicit authority, which the subsequent revelry, however noisy, could not erase.
The name "pine forest" for a place that today has "few young specimens" speaks to a history of savage deforestation. From here, and from Ayagaures, the finest firewood, precious wood for churches and convents throughout Gran Canaria, was extracted in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Today, the chapel is little more than a handful of stones and cement. But the Pinar de Santiago is now a recreational area where young pines reclaim their place. The visit is worthwhile, not for the architectural remains, but for the multitude of stories that emanate from every corner: the sailor's promise, the echo of chants, and, above all, the uninhibited hubbub of those bacchanals that, for a time, made the Apostle of Santiago the patron saint of an unforgettable festival on the peaks of Gran Canaria. A place where the divine and the human mingled brazenly.
