Spain: The paradigm of La Palma Island

The Canary Islands have a total area of 7,447 km2 of territory of volcanic origin, and a population of about 2,200,000 people. The island of La Palma, contributes to the Canarian autonomous community about 708 km2, and, just over 80,000 inhabitants, of which, right now, there are more than 7,000 evicted people, being affected for the moment an area of about 900 hectares . To this, we must add so many other people, who, not living in the Aridane Valley, did have their jobs in that area and now they have been left without them. Primary production generates almost half of the Gross Domestic Product of the island of La Palma, a circumstance more than meritorious in an ultra-peripheral island. Focusing on the rural world, the controversy generated by the future of the Aridane Valley has completely puzzled people who make a living from agriculture, livestock, and fishing, who contemplate in amazement how a natural phenomenon, which seems daunting to us, it is taking away their ...