Sugar, Slavery & the Early Colony

Within a year or two of the conquest of Gran Canaria, Castilian and Genoese investors planted sugar cane on the island, built water-powered mills to crush it, and staffed them with enslaved Africans and enslaved Guanches. That was the Canaries' first boom, it lasted roughly a century, and the plantation system it perfected was carried straight across the Atlantic to the Americas.

It is not a comfortable history and it is not a marginal one. Sugar is why the islands were worth conquering at all, why their early towns are where they are, why their oldest churches contain art that no small Atlantic parish should be able to afford — and why the word for a sugar mill, ingenio, is still the name of a Gran Canaria town on every road sign in the east of the island.

The sequence is short. Cane arrived from Madeira in the 1480s. Mills went up on the wettest, best-watered land. Labour was bought. Sugar went to Flanders, Genoa and England. And from about the middle of the sixteenth century Brazil, with far more land and far more enslaved people, produced it more cheaply than the islands ever could, and the whole thing collapsed.

Why sugar, and why here

Cane needs three things: heat, a great deal of water, and a great deal of labour. The Canaries had the first in abundance, the second in specific places — the north-facing, spring-fed valleys — and the third not at all, because the conquest had killed, enslaved or displaced much of the indigenous population.

What the islands also had was position. They were the last European land before the Atlantic, on the shipping routes to northern Europe, and they had just been attached to a Castilian crown keen to make them pay. Portuguese Madeira had shown the model worked a few decades earlier, so Madeiran cane, Madeiran technicians and Madeiran mill design came south, backed by Genoese, Flemish and Castilian money. Within a generation the sugar was flowing.

What an ingenio actually was

An ingenio was an industrial complex, and calling it a mill undersells it. Cane was cut by hand and had to be crushed within hours before the juice soured, so the mill ran continuously through the harvest. Water from a channel drove a wheel; the wheel drove rollers or presses that squeezed the cane; the juice ran to a boiling house where it was reduced in a cascade of copper cauldrons over furnaces fed with cane waste and, increasingly, with the island's own woodland. Skimmed, clarified, concentrated and poured into conical clay moulds, it drained and crystallised into sugar loaves, which were crated and shipped.

The boiling house was brutal work: open fires in a closed room in a hot climate, ladling near-boiling syrup, all night, through a harvest that ran for months. The deforestation was serious too — several islands lost large tracts of their lower woodland to the furnaces and the crates, which is one reason the surviving forests are all high up.

Who did the work

Three groups, in shifting proportions. Enslaved Africans, bought at the Guinea coast or on the Barbary coast opposite, and brought in through the island ports — the Canaries were a regular link in the early Atlantic slave trade, both as a market and as a transit point. Enslaved and forcibly resettled Guanches, taken during and after the conquest, sold in Valencia and Seville as well as retained on the islands. And free or semi-free wage labour, Portuguese and Castilian settlers and the descendants of the conquered indigenous islanders, working alongside enslaved people in the same fields.

Raiding for captives was organised from the eastern islands. Expeditions from Lanzarote and Fuerteventura crossed to the African coast to seize people, a practice that predated the conquest of the western islands and continued long after it — and which is a large part of why North African corsairs later returned the favour so enthusiastically, carrying off whole village populations from those same islands.

Numbers are genuinely uncertain and anyone quoting a precise one should be treated with caution. What the notarial records make clear is that enslaved people were a routine, substantial part of the population of sixteenth-century island society — bought, sold, inherited, baptised, occasionally freed, and present in households as well as on plantations. Slavery in the islands dwindled slowly rather than ending at a stroke.

Where the mills were

Follow the water. On Gran Canaria the cane country was the well-watered north and east: the valley behind Agaete, the lands around Gáldar, and the eastern plain where the town of Ingenio takes its name directly from the mill that stood there — a whole municipality named after a piece of sugar machinery. On La Palma the great estates were at Argual and Tazacorte in the fertile western valley, held by Flemish merchant families whose names still attach to buildings there. Tenerife's north coast and the Icod and Garachico area had their own; so did La Gomera.

Very little survives above ground, because a disused mill is a quarry. What you can see are the water channels, the odd stretch of aqueduct, a millstone set into a wall, and the place names — Ingenio, Ingenio Blanco, El Trapiche, La Zafra. Islanders talk about la zafra, the harvest season, to this day, in contexts that have nothing to do with sugar.

The Flemish paintings in the village church

Here is the detail that makes the whole thing visible. Canarian sugar went overwhelmingly to northern Europe, and Flanders was the biggest market. Payment came back partly in cash and partly in goods — and what the newly rich island merchants wanted was religious art. The result is that small churches on La Palma, Tenerife and Gran Canaria hold sixteenth-century Flemish panel paintings, carved and gilded retables and silverwork of a quality wildly out of proportion to the parishes that own them.

Walk into an unremarkable church in a village above Santa Cruz de La Palma and find a Flemish triptych in the side chapel, and you are looking at the sugar trade's receipt. It is one of the most rewarding things to look for on La Palma in particular.

The model that was exported

This is why the Canarian sugar century matters far beyond the islands. The plantation complex worked out in Madeira and refined here — a monoculture cash crop, a capital-intensive mill, a coerced workforce bought as property, and an export market on another continent — was transferred across the Atlantic almost intact. Columbus's second voyage in 1493 carried Canarian cane west; Canarian and Madeiran mill technicians followed; and within decades Hispaniola, then Brazil, then the Caribbean were running the same system at a scale the islands could never approach.

Historians describe the Atlantic islands as the rehearsal for the American plantation economy. That is exactly what they were, and the rehearsal took place in the valleys behind the beaches where people now sunbathe.

Why it ended

Brazilian sugar undercut Canarian sugar decisively from the middle of the sixteenth century — more land, better land, cheaper production, nothing the islands could answer. Island growers pulled up cane and planted vines instead, and for the next two hundred years the money came from malvasía wine shipped to England, a story told in our page on Canary wine. When the wine trade in turn collapsed, the islands moved to cochineal, then bananas, then tomatoes, then tourism. The pattern of a single export crop, boom and bust, has repeated so often here that it is practically the national economic condition.

Cane never quite disappeared. A little is still grown on Gran Canaria, and the rum distilled at Arehucas in Arucas — founded in the nineteenth century, when a brief cane revival took hold — is the living end of a five-hundred-year thread. Order a ron miel after dinner and you are drinking the last of the sugar boom.

How the islands talk about it now

Cautiously, and more openly than they used to. The indigenous past has been thoroughly rehabilitated in Canarian public life over the last forty years; the slave trade has had less attention, partly because the records are dispersed and partly because the story implicates local families as owners rather than only as victims. Museums in Las Palmas and on La Palma now address it directly, and academic work on Canarian slavery has grown substantially. But there is no monument on these islands to the people who worked the boiling houses, and that absence is noticeable once you start looking for it.

The bottom line

The Canaries' first economy was built on sugar and on people who were bought and sold, and it handed the Americas a working blueprint for doing the same thing at continental scale. You cannot see much of it, because mills get quarried and the enslaved leave few buildings — but you can see the Flemish altarpieces it paid for, the town called Ingenio, the water channels on the hillside above the banana plantations, and a set of Belgian-sounding surnames on the doorbells of Tazacorte.

It is worth an hour of anyone's holiday to know which of those you are looking at.