Famous Canarians

For a group of islands with a population smaller than Birmingham's, the Canaries have produced a remarkable number of people the rest of the world has heard of — a novelist Spaniards rank just behind Cervantes, a surrealist painter, one of the great operatic tenors, the shoemaker whose name is a punchline in Sex and the City, and a run of footballers out of all proportion to the numbers.

Part of the explanation is emigration. For centuries the only way to do almost anything here was to leave, and Canarians left in enormous numbers — for Madrid, for Paris, for Cuba and Venezuela. Part of it is the islands' position as a crossroads, which brought unusual parents and unusual educations to unlikely places. And part of it is simply that small, proud places produce people who want to prove something.

What follows is a tour rather than a ranking, grouped by what they did. Almost all of them have somewhere you can visit.

Benito Pérez Galdós, the novelist

Born in Las Palmas in 1843, Galdós is the towering Canarian figure. He wrote something close to a hundred novels, including Fortunata y Jacinta and the vast sequence of Episodios Nacionales that narrates nineteenth-century Spanish history in fiction, and Spanish critics have been comparing him to Dickens and Balzac ever since. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize and did not get it, partly because Spanish conservatives lobbied against him — he was an anticlerical liberal and it cost him.

He left the islands for Madrid at nineteen and set almost nothing in the Canaries, which locals have been politely grumbling about for a century. The house where he was born, in the old centre of Las Palmas, is now a museum, and the island's main theatre carries his name.

César Manrique, the artist who redesigned an island

Born in Arrecife in 1919, Manrique painted in Madrid and New York, came home in the mid-1960s, and then did something no other artist has quite managed: he persuaded a whole island to build his way. No high-rise, no billboards, white walls, and a series of visitor attractions carved into volcanic caves and craters. He died in a car accident in 1992, just outside the foundation he had made from his own house.

You can spend a full day on Lanzarote visiting nothing but his work — the full circuit is in our guide to Manrique's Lanzarote, and the foundation he built inside five linked lava bubbles is the place to start.

Óscar Domínguez, the surrealist

Born near La Laguna on Tenerife in 1906, Domínguez went to Paris in his twenties, fell in with André Breton's circle and became one of the few Spaniards at the centre of surrealism. He is credited with developing decalcomania — pressing paint between surfaces and pulling them apart to produce forms nobody designed — a technique that spread through the movement. His later life was unhappy and he died by his own hand in Paris in 1957.

Tenerife has the best collection of his work, at TEA in Santa Cruz, and it is the single best reason to walk into that building.

Néstor and the invention of "Canarian style"

Néstor Martín-Fernández de la Torre, born in Las Palmas in 1887, painted lush symbolist sea and forest cycles and then turned to something more consequential: with his brother he promoted a deliberately Canarian architecture, drawing on old island building, as an alternative to generic modern development. The model village of Pueblo Canario in Las Palmas, with its museum of his work, is the manifesto in built form — and you can argue that Manrique was doing the same job a generation later with more power behind him.

Alfredo Kraus, the tenor

Born in Las Palmas in 1927 to a Canarian mother and an Austrian father, Kraus became one of the outstanding lyric tenors of the twentieth century — famous for a discipline that kept his voice intact into his sixties, and for refusing the heavier roles that would have paid better and ruined him. The concert hall on the seafront at the end of Las Canteras beach carries his name, and islanders will tell you within about ninety seconds of any conversation about music that he is theirs.

Manolo Blahnik, and an Oscar winner

The detail that surprises British visitors most: Manolo Blahnik was born in 1942 on a banana plantation outside Santa Cruz de La Palma, to a Czech father and a Spanish mother, and grew up on the island making shoes for lizards out of sweet wrappers and foil — a story he has told often enough that it must be at least partly true. He has kept the connection and La Palma has returned it with honours and an exhibition.

The other export of that sort is Javier Bardem. The Oscar-winning actor was born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in 1969 into the Bardem acting dynasty, though the family moved to Madrid while he was small. He played rugby for Spain as a teenager before acting, which explains rather a lot about the physical presence.

The footballers, and a village that produced two of them

Here is the genuinely surprising fact. Arguineguín, a small fishing settlement on the south coast of Gran Canaria, produced both Juan Carlos Valerón — the elegant playmaker who spent a decade at Deportivo de La Coruña and played for Spain — and David Silva, who won four Premier League titles with Manchester City, a World Cup and two European Championships with Spain, and is regarded in England as one of the finest technicians the league has seen. Two internationals of that calibre from one village of a few thousand people is not a normal statistic. Silva finished his playing career at the Gran Canaria club and the town has not stopped being pleased about it since; you can walk past the harbour in Arguineguín without the slightest clue any of it happened.

Tenerife has its own production line. Pedro Rodríguez — Pedro, of Barcelona, Chelsea and Spain — is from Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Pedri, born Pedro González López in the small northern town of Tegueste in 2002, came through Las Palmas, moved to Barcelona at seventeen and was a European champion with Spain before he was twenty-two; he is currently the most famous Canarian alive. And Sergio Rodríguez, from La Laguna, is one of very few Spaniards to have had a proper NBA career, in a basketball culture the islands take seriously. If you want to see any of it live, our guide to watching football on the islands covers both island clubs.

Carla Suárez Navarro

Born in Las Palmas in 1988, Suárez reached the world top ten with a one-handed backhand that commentators never stopped talking about. What made her a national figure, though, was the end: she was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma in 2020, went through chemotherapy, and came back to play a farewell season including the Olympics in 2021. She retired on her own terms, which is not how these stories usually go.

Voices and other exports

Rosana Arbelo, from Lanzarote, wrote and sang some of the biggest Spanish-language hits of the 1990s in a husky voice that is instantly recognisable across Latin America. Pedro Guerra, from Tenerife, is one of Spain's most respected singer-songwriters. The folk choir Los Sabandeños has been recording Canarian music since the 1960s and is effectively a national institution, and the entry point if you want to understand the islands' own musical tradition. And in the sciences, Blas Cabrera, born in Arrecife in 1878, became Spain's leading physicist of his generation and hosted Einstein in Madrid.

The bottom line

The islands' famous children divide neatly into those who left and made their name elsewhere — Galdós, Domínguez, Blahnik, most of the footballers — and the rarer ones who came home and changed the place. Manrique is the outstanding example of the second kind, which is why his work is now the reason many people visit at all.

If you want to follow the trail, the concentration is in two cities: the old streets of Vegueta in Las Palmas for Galdós, Néstor and Kraus, and the museums of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, where the Auditorio and TEA sit within ten minutes' walk of each other.