Gáldar, the first capital of Gran Canaria, is immersed in an ambitious archaeological project that will recover and integrate a large part of the city’s outskirts into its urban fabric. This is the Barrio Hospital, an ancient troglodyte village inhabited for around 1,200 years, whose caves have been reused from the time of the Guanches until the 21st century. Arqueocanaria professionals have exhumed from oblivion a set of around forty caves, some superimposed on four levels. So far this summer, a thousand tons of rubble that buried the indigenous quarter have been removed. What the archaeologists did not expect was to unearth a large quantity and variety of documents on the culture of the first settlers of the Canary Islands. The “fault” for this action lies with the new institute that opens its doors this year: IES Agáldar.
Located in the north of the island, Gáldar has 25,000 inhabitants. Along with Telde, to the east of Gran Canaria, it was the most populated and influential region of pre-Hispanic society in the 15th century, the century in which the archipelago was conquered. It is home to a rich archaeological heritage and is the only nucleus of the islands to have a large site integrated into its historic centre: the Cueva Pintada Museum and Archaeological Park, the jewel of rock art in the Canary Islands and one of the best-preserved indigenous monuments. towns on the islands. Despite this, it lacks a comprehensive management plan.
It also has a single mayor. Teodoro Sosa was proportionally the most voted in Spain among municipalities with more than 20,000 inhabitants. He was elected five terms ago, the last three with an absolute majority. In an interview, he said: “I have never been in the closet and, therefore, I have not come out”, but the measure he adopted upon his election in 2007 is even more relevant: he was the first mayor in the country to apply an ERE in a town hall. “You will never be mayor again”, they told him, but history was written differently. An engineer by profession, Sosa is a staunch defender of the indigenous footprint and wants to rewrite its legacy in his hometown. To do this, he is promoting an urban transformation through the construction of the new institute. Located next to the bed of the Gáldar ravine, on former agricultural land, three pedestrian accesses and one road access had to be built.
The first step was to clean the pre-Hispanic village because the three roads pass very close to the site. The archaeologists, given the relevance of what they found, proposed a global action, taking advantage of “the enormous potential of the complex and its area of influence, as well as the ethnographic heritage of the old irrigation system of the farms,” Valentín Barroso and Cheli Marrero, co-directors of the company Arqueocanaria, explained to this newspaper. “It is not only about recovering the site but also integrating the old hydraulic infrastructures, through which the students will pass to get to the institute,” the archaeologists say.
Miguel Ángel Clavijo, Director General of Cultural Heritage of the Government of the Canary Islands, the institution that is financing this intervention together with the City Council, states that “this is perhaps the most important project that is being developed in the Canary Islands. I am convinced that it will be a reference at the national level. Gáldar, adds Clavijo Redondo, “is a reference in cultural heritage and we will continue to support it with all our strength because we have a unique opportunity to demonstrate to Canarian society the importance of preserving the memory of the community.”
Without a master plan
But not all opinions are positive. The doctor and prestigious archaeologist Jorge Onrubia, an authoritative voice in the scientific community, not only Spanish but international, affirms that “the site of the Barrio Hospital was something known and it is unacceptable that the works were carried out under this pressure and without planning or any anticipation.” Onrubia recalls that the works began at the beginning of the summer, forcing the archaeologists to work overtime before the imminent inauguration of the institute.
Jorge Onrubia, university professor and scientific director of Cueva Pintada, regrets this situation: “It is a pity and what is needed is to design and implement a master plan for the comprehensive management of the archaeological heritage of the historic site of Agáldar.”
And what does the mayor of Gáldar, also an advisor to the presidency of the Cabildo of Gran Canaria and responsible for the historical heritage of the island corporation, think about it? We do not know. Despite the insistence of the author of this report, his spokesman told us that Sosa “will make statements at the official presentation of the results.”
The troglodyte habitat has always been known, but it has never been explored and even less excavated. The dwelling caves were reused and enlarged as dwellings for centuries, in some cases, and in others they were associated with ponds and canals. The complex fell into disuse with the abandonment of agriculture and became a marginal area. In the 80s of the last century it was colonized by drug addicts. In response to complaints from the neighborhood, a mayor had the idea of burying the caves with hundreds of tons of earth, stones and debris.
The crazy idea of burying an archaeological site, however, did not solve the social problem, as people with drug addiction problems and prostitutes continued to wander around the Barrio Hospital, although over time their numbers decreased thanks to social assistance and health programs.
Silos and barns
Today, archaeologists have discovered a heritage that they did not imagine. Beyond the discovery of ceramic remains, lithic tools and stone mills, “several levels of caves have emerged, up to four, with enormous granaries, full of silos, which have not been documented; others have sets of bowls,” explains Valentín Barroso. “What was a cleaning work to allow the roads to circulate has allowed us to discover a very large historical complex with a great variety of documents,” explains the archaeologist.
Archaeologist Cheli Marrero considers that “we are facing a great opportunity to enhance all the historical elements that are around the roads, from the pre-Hispanic period of Gáldar and later.” An insertion project “with the recovery of stone walls, ponds, ditches… Some elements, in short, that will tell us several centuries of the evolution of the municipality, gathered in a 21st century institute”, an educational center located in a place with a millennium of history.
The IES Agáldar campus itself houses vestiges of indigenous work. “There are the remains of a circular hut that preserves part of its wall,” explains Barroso. Inside, a mortar was found for grinding cereals such as barley, with which the first Canarians prepared gofio. The hut is located several meters below the ground floor of the institute. It is protected by a concrete cover and students will be able to see it through a window. The researcher considers that it was a space “for dismantling animals due to the remains of goats found”; In addition, it has “a stratigraphy of a meter and a half that we are going to analyze and be able to date precisely.”
There is another indigenous imprint inside the institute whose purpose is unknown. These are thick parallel walls with a width that exceeds a meter and a length close to twenty. They converge towards the remains of another robust construction, as seen in the photo below this paragraph. The structures emerge on the surface of the center, on the north facade.
The site of the Hospital Barrio is another example that illustrates the character of Gáldar as a superimposed city, which developed and had continuity in the settlement of the ancient Canarians, but these, in turn, built structures at different levels, as we see in the complex. .of caves. These are cavities dug in tuff, an easily moldable volcanic material that allowed the aboriginal population to enlarge them and adapt them to their needs.
Historian Juan Sebastián López García, professor on leave from the Department of Art, City and Territory of the ULPGC School of Architecture, has completed a doctoral thesis on the historic centres of the Canary Islands. What is Gáldar’s main contribution? “The concept of a superimposed city. No other historic centre has this conception so clearly,” he tells the newspaper. “Today’s discoveries corroborate and extend this evidence in the current city. It is a coexistence of the old and the modern. It is fantastic that the new institute has a site and that right next door there is a pre-Hispanic archaeological park, developing a contemporaneity that reinforces this concept of Gáldar as a superimposed city.
superimposed agaldar
Gáldar, its official chronicler tells us, “is the only place in the Canary Islands where the chronicles speak of specific constructions, such as the Guanartemes Palace, the Maidens’ Houses or the Cercada Square, a series of elements documented in the chronicles of the Conquest that tell us of an overlap that is also reflected in its name, a mixture of the pre-Hispanic place name Agaldar with the European name Santiago de los Caballeros de Gáldar. The chronicles certify that “many Canarians continued to live here.”
The Cueva Pintada complex, declared a National Historic-Artistic Monument in 1972, illustrates Dr. López: “it is not the town of Cueva Pintada, it is part of the old Agáldar, that is, the superimposed Gáldar that had a perimeter and that became emergent. The same goes for the cave village that is currently being investigated. “This valorization, because the caves were known but others appear, some surprising, it is not an isolated phenomenon, “it is the great superimposed Agáldar that some did not want to see, which was made up of different neighborhoods.”
To continue to deepen this investigation, the Cabildo of Gran Canaria is considering including 200,000 euros in the 2025 budget, he confirmed to Canary Islands now Juan Sebastián López, island director of historical heritage of the island corporation.
“The Barrio Hospital site speaks to us,” López emphasizes, “of a stratified or excavated Gáldar. It extends from the level of the ravine to the highest part, where the Plaza de Santiago is located, crowned by the current 18th-century neoclassical temple, built next to the original church – the parish dates back to 1486, three years after its completion, the Conquest of the Island -, in turn built on the Palace of the Guanartemes to which the chronicles refer.
Between the historic center and the caves of the institute there is a large plot of land with building permits for years, but no work has been started because in the subsoil there are remains from before and after the Conquest, discovered after preventive tastings. Once again, the Gáldar have overlapped.
The aim is to create, financed by the ownership of the land, an urban park of archaeological character and to leave a small area, the one with the least potential as certified by the tastings carried out, to build a low-rise building that integrates and will coexist with the remains of the past. This large space is the last element that fuses the indigenous culture of Agáldar with that of the 21st century.
