Just as the Castilians once offered mirrors to the indigenous people in exchange for gold, today many in Las Palmas live off the reflection cast by southern Gran Canaria, unaware that its brilliance is not their own, but borrowed. Gran Canaria is split in two. This isn't due to climate or landscape. It's due to perception. It's due to resentment. The north, and especially the capital, looks down on the touristy south, not for what it is, but for what it can no longer be. Because Las Palmas destroyed its coastline decades ago. It razed its dunes, its urban beaches, and its waterfront with oil platforms that have been damaged since 2016, waiting for someone in Indonesia to scrap them, with industrial docks filled with empty containers that obscure the view of the sea, with bankrupt shopping malls, with burned-out museum ships, with an urban planning marked by the aluminosity of corruption and eternally unfinished projects.
And this urban, social, and economic failure isn't acknowledged. It's projected. It's disguised as moral superiority. It turns into contempt for the south of Gran Canaria, which is accused of being vulgar, touristy, plasticky, as if it weren't precisely that south—with its receptions, its hotels, and its waiters—that keeps a large part of the island's GDP standing.
Social resentment is a phenomenon that arises not only from economic or cultural differences, but is rooted in perceptions of injustice and loss of status within a community. According to anthropologist René Girard, this feeling is fueled by mimetic rivalry, where one group imitates and envies another, generating tension that can lead to rejection or contempt. In the case of Gran Canaria, the resentment that some sectors of Las Palmas feel toward the south not only reflects economic differences, but is a complex result of constant comparison and frustration over unequal development, which leads to a rejection that hides their true dependence on the brilliance and wealth generated by the south.
The northerner attends festivals, boasts about his "cultural capital," and criticizes the concrete of the south, as if he didn't live off it. As if the wrinkled potatoes served in Vegueta tasted more like earth than those in Playa del Inglés. As if their salaries, their roads, and their institutions weren't largely funded by the millions of tourists who travel down the GC-1.
And the most ironic thing: many of those who disown the south are the same ones who rent their apartments on Airbnb, who spend their summers there in winter, who recommend its beaches to any visitor, but then mock its tourists, its foreigners, and attack its shopping malls on social media. They criticize what sustains them, like someone biting the hand that feeds them... with their mouths full of mojitos and their umbrellas planted in the dunes. The south has often been treated as a place of passage, a place of services, a second-class place. But it's time to say it clearly: the south doesn't need the approval of the north. It needs respect, its own voice, and an awareness of its power. Because if we continue to allow them to sell us mirrors while they keep the gold, it won't be surprising if one day they also take the sun away, just as they did Carnival.
