Ernst Jünger’s 1970 insight into Gran Canaria tourism

A meeting of minds on Radio Canarias

Journalist Tomás Galván recently interviewed me on Radio Canarias, with questions that ranged from the personal to the tourism model and its future. This is a reflection that has become part of our collective identity, one that has occupied such diverse figures as Néstor and his brother Miguel Martín-Fernández de la Torre, sociologist Mario Gaviria, César Manrique and José Miguel Alonso Fernández-Aceytuno, among others. However, it is the figure of Ernst Jünger that most captures my attention, for he was one of the 20th century thinkers who most lucidly perceived the effects of mass tourism.

Jünger’s prescient diary entries

In his 1970 diaries, he linked the malaise associated with car traffic to the alterations that tourist development was beginning to produce in the Canarian landscape. This reveals one of the central tensions of his thought: the conflict between nature and technology. I have tried to locate newspaper references to his stay on Gran Canaria, a little-known visit that coincides with the early years of the island’s great tourist boom. Jünger resided at the Hotel Santa Catalina between April and August 1970, just as Maspalomas Costa Canaria was beginning to displace the capital as the island’s main tourist destination. That year, 466,632 visitors arrived on Gran Canaria.

Two realities, one island

During his stay, he contrasted two realities: the extraordinary geological and landscape uniqueness of the island and the accelerated transformation caused by urbanisation and tourism. I have found no articles, interviews or journalistic references about his time on the island. Nor do his memoirs mention contacts with local figures, despite describing numerous places he visited in detail. However, his notes allow us to reconstruct three stages: a first period of discovery, focused on the Atlantic light, the insular condition and the urban life of Las Palmas; a second period of exploration of the territory and the traditional coastal landscape; and a third period of critical reflection, where Gran Canaria became a laboratory for studying the relationship between nature, technology, tourism and urbanisation.

A naturalist’s eye on mass tourism

Jünger was noted for his interest in observing nature, entomology, extreme landscapes and his critique of technological civilisation. Gran Canaria offered him an exceptional setting to simultaneously observe primordial nature and accelerated modernisation. Various studies on literature and tourism in the Canary Islands present him precisely as an observer sensitive to the tension between natural paradise and landscape degradation.

Not just a fleeting visit

The 1970 stay does not appear to have been an isolated episode. There are references to earlier visits to the archipelago and observations about the Canary Islands in other texts, suggesting a long-standing interest in the islands. It is also possible, though not documented, that he was indirectly aware of the work of scientists such as Günther Kunkel or Erik Sventenius, key figures in botanical research in the Canary Islands.

A prophetic critique

Jünger’s relevance lies in the fact that he formulated this critique in 1970, when mass tourism was only just beginning to deploy all its effects. He detected processes that would become the subject of social, territorial and environmental debate decades later. For him, Gran Canaria functioned as a privileged observatory of one of the great themes of his later work: the conflict between nature and technology. It is striking that this reflection coincides temporally and on the same island with those formulated by Mario Gaviria, who defined the origins of mass tourism as ‘tourism a go-go’ in his work España a Go-Go. Turismo charter y neocolonialismo del espacio, and with the concerns of César Manrique.

Two perspectives on a common problem

In those years, Manrique was already a cultural reference in the Canary Islands. On Gran Canaria, his interventions such as the mural at the Real Club Náutico (1962), the Casa del Marino (1964), the Hotel Folías (1965) and the mural at the Hotel Cristina (1970) remained fully relevant, and he maintained an intense relationship with artists and intellectuals from Gran Canaria. In 1970, Manrique formulated a phrase that has now become one of the slogans of his centenary: ‘I am a contemporary of the future.’ Meanwhile, Jünger was writing on Gran Canaria about mass tourism, the transformation of the landscape, the advance of technology and the loss of a place’s distinctiveness. Both were reflecting, from different perspectives, on the same historical problem: how to preserve an island’s identity in the face of the homogenising forces of modernity.

Still searching for modernity’s traces

Fifty-six years later, we are still searching for the traces of that modernity. And there are probably few places like Gran Canaria where so many figures interested in understanding the effects of rapid tourist development on territory, landscape and identity have coincided.

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