A group of 68 residents of Tafira and Marzagán tried in 1871, 150 years ago now, to segregate as a municipality from the capital. The matter arrived in Madrid, without success, at the beginning of the First Republic.
Year 1871. Spain and the Canary Islands in particular are plunged in the midst of political, social and economic change. Amadeo I of Savoy assumes his first year as king, the drums of republicanism are heard, the insular lawsuit faces the elites of Gran Canaria and Tenerife and the cochineal business is in all its splendor. In this context, A group of 68 residents of the payments of Tafira and Marzagán complained on December 19 of that year, by means of a letter sent to the Provincial Commission of the Canary Islands -based in Santa Cruz de Tenerife-, the segregation of its territory from the municipality of Las Palmas. This process culminated without success at the beginning of 1874 after the intervention of the Ministry of the Interior, already in full I Republic; so it left the promoters of the initiative without their desire for independence.
150 years have passed since such an event and The current Tafira has little to do with that town of peasants. According to the description made by the historians Candelaria González Rodríguez and Javier Sosa Henríquez in Approach to the population study of the payments of Tafira and Marzagán in the 19th century, both localities were distinguished by a rural character “more accentuated” than the rest of the municipality of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, with a population dedicated to agriculture and relatively far from the city, a fact that led, they indicate, this failed segregation project.
That December 19, 1871, a group of residents of Tafira and Marzagán, led by Tomás Suárez de la Coba, requested the segregation of the land equivalent to the parish of Tafira -created in 1847- and whose limits were in the Vega de San José , Barranco Seco and Guiniguada; the capital municipality would have been restricted to the coastal strip from Vegueta to La Isleta, since the rest corresponded to the extinct San Lorenzo. In addition, they proposed the nucleus of El Tanque -currently Tafira Alta- as head of the new town hall.
Own church, school and town hall
The desire to achieve a local government of its own in Tafira it came from behind. Javier Campos Oramas reviews in his book The parish of Tafira (1847-1957) several attempts in the first half of the 19th century, corresponding to the petition to the authorities to create a parish in the town. One of the first would correspond to the one made by Miguel Magdaleno Sandoval in 1816, in which they requested their own church, school and town hall. “The idea was, if the Church recognizes that we have autonomy, the administration should do the same,” he says.
The City Council of the capital appealed to the central government to suspend the process of segregation of Tafira
The residents achieved their own parish in 1847, but the rest of their claims remained in the drawer. We would have to wait until the 1870s for them to return with force, in the heat of the Glorious Revolution of 1868. Unlike on other occasions, the 1871 segregation petition was successful in its first process. The Provincial Commission asked the Las Palmas city council for a report certifying the number of inhabitants in the area and the wealth of these payments, data necessary to process segregation based on the Municipal Law of 1868.
The legislation established that a locality could be segregated from another as long as: it had more than 200 neighbors -not inhabitants, since only men with rights were taken into account-, that the people justify that they will be able to defray municipal expenses, that the The request is made by the majority of the population and in the case of hamlets or villages located at a distance from the municipal head. González Rodríguez points out that in the data provided by both the segregationists and the Capital City Council “very marked gaps are observed”, in favor of one or another position. The truth is that the town was demanding a public school and a cemetery at the time, but these infrastructures did not arrive until the beginning of the 20th century.
«From this first moment the City Council [de Las Palmas] It shows its opposition to this segregationist attempt ”, indicate the historians. Moreover, the Consistory doubted the legality of the process, hence the appeal to the provincial Governor. After several requests, he sent the report in August, expressing “his disagreement”. They denied the assertion of the neighbors, who assured that Tafira was “without authority” and that it was an unsafe area; they considered that the wealth of the payments “does not give enough to cover a municipal budget” and they specified the need to know “if the majority really was in favor.
The survey came at the end of the year. Historians collect that 47.4% of the residents of Tafira were in favor and in Marzagán only 9.6%. But, “the most significant thing,” they point out, is that those who made the document indicated that “no one was against.” A fact that they associate “to the manipulation of the popular will”, something so common in the times of caciquismo.
Las Palmas would have seen its surface and population diminished, to the detriment of Santa Cruz de Tenerife
The capital city council was thus forced to appeal to the Supreme Government of the Nation and request that it decree the suspension of the agreement of the Provincial Commission. And it is that the segregation of Tafira would have reduced the surface and the budget of Las Palmas, putting it to the detriment of its rival, Santa Cruz de Tenerife. In fact, the minutes of the municipal plenary session of May 1873, indicate that the Town Hall was already in crisis and it was forced to cut off the gas street lighting not being able to afford it. “The precariousness of the accounts was a constant throughout the nineteenth century,” says González Rodríguez.
“Sorry to sign such a petition”
In the same plenary session in 1873, one of the councilors stressed that several of the residents “were” sorry for signing such a petition. ” Seven of the nine aediles -with the mayor, Hurtado de Mendoza- They agreed to present an appeal to the central government. There was only one vote against, that of the federal republican Donato Oramas, who pointed out that he was in favor of “not taking away the individual rights of each people.” “The decentralization that favored the Revolutionary Sexennium led to this type of emancipation attempts by different localities throughout Spain,” says the historian González Rodríguez.
The provincial Governor pointed out in June 1873 that the Commission lacked powers and the process began to unravel. The Government of the Republic declared the file null on December 25, 1873, a fact that the City Council of Las Palmas collects in the minutes in March 1874. The Ministry of the Interior thus stated that the process “should not have gone beyond the first steps” for lack of agreement between the interested parties, that the urgency of the case “did not exist”, that the Provincial Delegation -in Tenerife- did not have powers in this regard -they were from Madrid-; and that the Governor should not have communicated the Commission’s agreement for its compliance, “having declared that he did not consent to the dismemberment of Las Palmas.”
The historian emphasizes, by way of hypothesis, that this process responded to “a few neighbors” with interests to “ascend” in politics from the municipal, and that falls within the federalist logics and of giving autonomy to the territories of that period in the history of Spain. Even so, “it is difficult to believe that such an initiative would emerge from a rural population like the one in these payments.” Furthermore, a good part of the agricultural lands of Tafira were in the hands of wealthy families from Vegueta and Triana, which is why, suggests González Rodríguez, “it would not be convenient” for them to be independent; the insular litigation background with Tenerife I would do the rest to avoid the loss of territory and population.
