Maspalomas
Maspalomas is a tourist resort in the south of the island of Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, stretching from Bahía Feliz in the east to Meloneras in the west, including the resort towns of San Agustín and Playa del Inglés and San Fernando. Maspalomas constitutes the southernmost part of the municipality of San Bartolomé de Tirajana, and of the island.
Before the era of tourism, Maspalomas was the name of a hamlet in what today is San Fernando de Maspalomas. Its name may derive from that of Rodrigo Mas de Palomar, a settler and soldier from Majorca, or from Francisco Palomar, a Genoese friend of Alonso Fernandez de Lugo who purchased 87 Guanche slaves from Güímar and settled in the area.
Present-day Maspalomas is the result of an ambitious development project, organized in the form of an International Ideas Contest (opened to any member of the International Union of Architects), held in 1961 under the auspice of Alejandro del Castillo, owner and promoter of most of the space under construction. The contest was won by the French office SETAP (including the urbanist Guy Lagneau and the economist Michel Weill) and covered the 1060 ha and 19 km of coast that constitute the core area of Maspalomas - Costa Canaria. The contest paved the way for a particular way of understanding "touristic" urbanism that served as a model for later tourist development in other Canary Islands.
Before the era of tourism, Maspalomas was the name of a hamlet in what today is San Fernando de Maspalomas. Its name may derive from that of Rodrigo Mas de Palomar, a settler and soldier from Majorca, or from Francisco Palomar, a Genoese friend of Alonso Fernandez de Lugo who purchased 87 Guanche slaves from Güímar and settled in the area.
Present-day Maspalomas is the result of an ambitious development project, organized in the form of an International Ideas Contest (opened to any member of the International Union of Architects), held in 1961 under the auspice of Alejandro del Castillo, owner and promoter of most of the space under construction. The contest was won by the French office SETAP (including the urbanist Guy Lagneau and the economist Michel Weill) and covered the 1060 ha and 19 km of coast that constitute the core area of Maspalomas - Costa Canaria. The contest paved the way for a particular way of understanding "touristic" urbanism that served as a model for later tourist development in other Canary Islands.
Map - Maspalomas
Map
Country - Spain
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Flag of Spain |
Anatomically modern humans first arrived in the Iberian Peninsula around 42,000 years ago. The ancient Iberian and Celtic tribes, along with other pre-Roman peoples, dwelled the territory maintaining contacts with foreign Mediterranean cultures. The Roman conquest and colonization of the peninsula (Hispania) ensued, bringing the Romanization of the population. Receding of Western Roman imperial authority ushered in the migration of different non-Roman peoples from Central and Northern Europe with the Visigoths as the dominant power in the peninsula by the fifth century. In the early eighth century, most of the peninsula was conquered by the Umayyad Caliphate, and during early Islamic rule, Al-Andalus became a dominant peninsular power centered in Córdoba. Several Christian kingdoms emerged in Northern Iberia, chief among them León, Castile, Aragon, Portugal, and Navarre made an intermittent southward military expansion, known as Reconquista, repelling the Islamic rule in Iberia, which culminated with the Christian seizure of the Emirate of Granada in 1492. Jews and Muslims were forced to choose between conversion to Catholicism or expulsion, and eventually the converts were expelled through different royal decrees.
Currency / Language
ISO | Currency | Symbol | Significant figures |
---|---|---|---|
EUR | Euro | € | 2 |
ISO | Language |
---|---|
EU | Basque language |
CA | Catalan language |
GL | Galician language |
OC | Occitan language |
ES | Spanish language |