Las Palmas

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria is a port city on the northeast coast of Gran Canaria, one of the Canary Islands of Spain in the Atlantic. It shares the status of capital of the Canary Islands with Santa Cruz de Tenerife and is the capital of the province of Las Palmas. The novelist Benito Pérez Galdós was born in the city.

Juan Rejón founded the Real de Las Palmas in 1478 as a camp of the Crown of Castile, named after the palm trees by the Guiniguada ravine. Christopher Columbus stopped on the island in 1492 to repair the Pinta, and the Casa de Colón in the old Vegueta quarter recalls his visits. The port of La Luz was built in the late 19th century, and British companies used it as a coaling station and to ship bananas and tomatoes to Europe. When the islands were split into two provinces in the 1920s, the city became the capital of the eastern one.

The Port of La Luz y de Las Palmas supplies fuel and stores to ships on the routes between Europe, Africa and America, and fishing fleets from many countries land their catch there. Compañía Cervecera de Canarias brews Tropical beer in the city. Tirma, based in Las Palmas, makes chocolates and potato chips.

The Cathedral of Santa Ana, begun in the early 16th century, has Gothic vaults inside and a neoclassical front added later. Las Canteras beach runs along the isthmus on the north side of the city, sheltered from the open Atlantic by a natural reef called La Barra. The Carnival of Las Palmas, held each February or March, chooses a drag queen and ends with the burial of the sardine. The painter Néstor Martín-Fernández de la Torre, known for his Poem of the Atlantic series, was also born in Las Palmas.