CAPITAL ISLAND WITH INTERCULTURAL VOCATION

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The Canary Islands have always occupied a place in the imagination of the West starring a leading role in mythography and Greco-Roman mythology, thanks to Greeks sailors, Phoenicians and Carthaginians, who in classical times reached the shores of the islands located in the edge of the world, on the Gloomy Ocean.

In this enclave Platon placed the Atlantis, the lost continent, here the ancient Greeks placed the Champs Elysees, the final resting place of men, located beyond the Pillars of Hercules.

Its status as a liminal territory granted in the ancient world to the archipelago, names as The Garden of the Hesperides, where the nymphs of the same name, guarded the apples of immortality. And from this derived to the name of The Fortunate Isles, that has reached our days.

This privileged place occupied by the Islands in Western mythology, became practical and real after its rediscovery and conquest in the fifteenth century. Las Palmas of Gran Canaria was the first port and bridge between the New and the Old World. And the city was then itself a prototype of which were drawn later cities in America from Patagonia to Canada.

The novel American Land came to Europe through the sieve of the Canary Islands, stories and goods arrived in their ports to set sail to Europe. So the city of Las Palmas of Gran Canaria was attacked by pirates, Europeans and also North Africans, and became an inescapable commercial and cultural crossroads. The first city would soon change from being extra-military bastion to become a flourishing town, where Spaniards, Portuguese and Genoese, settled their lives and launched the cultivation, and trade of sugar cane supplied to European markets.

This role played from the Atlantic, in the mythic imagination and the practical reality has to be renewed later today, with a renewed intercultural vocation, serving as a intercontinental platform between Europe, Africa and America, between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Therefore, the farthest city in the south of Europe, the peripheral Ultra-Island Capital, wants to acquire resources and strategies that respond to an immediate and concrete future that emerges of West Africa, and that channels cultural and economic transfer between Europe and Africa, with structures and sustainable actions to ensure lasting cooperation. Facing 2016, the year in which a Spanish city will be European Capital of Culture, we will work with a strong intercultural vocation extending the concept of Cultural Capital to the entire island, making it extensible to all municipalities in order to ensure participation of all population in this exciting project.