The day the earth changed direction
On September 1, 1730, Lanzarote began to change forever. The earth opened up near Chimanfaya and for weeks the eruptions transformed the center of the island into an unrecognizable landscape.
The account attributed to the priest of Yaiza, Andrés Lorenzo Curbelo, allows us to follow that catastrophe almost day by day. And September 7 appears as a particularly dramatic date: a huge rock violently emerged from the interior of the earth and the lava flow modified its trajectory, advancing towards the northwest and west-northwest.
In that advance, Maretas and Santa Catalina were lost.
Santa Catalina existed before the volcano arrived
It is worth pausing here, because the name can be misleading. The Santa Catalina of 1730 was not the current nucleus of Los Valles de Santa Catalina, in Teguise. It was an ancient settlement located much further south, in the territory we now associate with the volcanic landscape of Tinajo.
The research of Agustín Pallarés allows us to approximate its location to the surroundings of the current Montaña de Santa Catalina, in the old Vega de Santa Catalina, next to the area of the Caldera de la Rilla. The latter is located approximately three and a half kilometers west-southwest of Tinguatón. We are not, therefore, talking about a village lost in a legend, but about a place whose position can be reconstructed from toponymy, historical documentation, and the volcanic landscape.
"The good place of Santa Catalina with its Church"
The contemporary documentation of the eruption is especially moving. A letter from the Cabildo of Lanzarote to the Audiencia in October 1730 listed the affected places and expressly mentioned "the good place of Santa Catalina with its Church." The phrase allows us to imagine what disappeared: not only lands covered by lava, but an organized community, its homes, its cultivation spaces, and its religious building. The eruption did not leave an abandoned village to be rebuilt. It left a buried village.
The image that escaped the volcano
But the story did not end with the arrival of the lava. The inhabitants who could flee sought other places on the island. And with them traveled something that could be preserved when the houses could no longer be preserved: memory.
The image of Santa Catalina, along with its jewels, was saved and deposited in the church of Teguise.
With time it would be taken to the new church of Los Valles. Thus, while the old village found a new home. it remained covered by the malpaís, its patron saint and its name
The name that survived
Here appears perhaps the most unknown part of this story. Los Valles de Santa Catalina, in Teguise, should not be understood simply as another toponym of Lanzarote. Its denomination is linked to the memory of that population destroyed by the volcanoes. The original village disappeared. Its inhabitants had to rebuild their lives. But Santa Catalina continued to be pronounced, written, and remembered. The volcano could erase the houses. It did not manage to completely erase the name.
A village we cannot see today
Whoever crosses the Tinguatón area today, contemplates the Montaña de Santa Catalina or approaches the Caldera de la Rilla finds volcanoes, cones, malpaís, and an apparently uninhabited landscape. But that landscape was built on another human landscape. Beneath the lavas we admire as natural heritage, there existed a Lanzarote of farmers, families, roads, crops, and places of worship. Santa Catalina is part of that disappeared geography that only history can return to us.
September 7th gives the landscape its name again
September 7, 1730, was not just another day of the Timanfaya eruptions. It was the day when a modification in the advance of the lava flows led the fire towards Maretas and Santa Catalina and ended a human community. Today we can approach the place. We can identify its geographical references. We can pronounce its name. What we can no longer do is find its streets. Because Santa Catalina ceased to exist as a village 296 years ago.
A memory that the volcano could not bury
Some catastrophes destroy buildings. Others transform landscapes. And some do both at the same time. The story of Santa Catalina combines all three dimensions. A village was left under the lava. The surrounding landscape was transformed forever. And its inhabitants had to start anew. But an image remained. A toponym remained. A tradition remained. And a story remained, waiting to be recovered, which perhaps many Lanzaroteans—like the one writing these lines until knowing it—had never related to the landscape they travel. Santa Catalina disappeared from the map that September of 1730. But Lanzarote refused to forget it.
The Valleys of Santa Catalina are, three centuries later, one of the visible traces of that memory.
Historical precision
The location of the old hamlet is offered as a historical reconstruction and not as an exact archaeological coordinate. Documentation and toponymic studies allow it to be situated in the surroundings of the current Montaña de Santa Catalina and the Caldera de la Rilla, in the vicinity of Tinguatón. It should not be confused with the current Valleys of Santa Catalina, in Teguise.
Reference sources: Andrés Lorenzo Curbelo and contemporary documentation of the 1730 eruption; studies by Agustín Pallarés on the toponymy and historical volcanology of Lanzarote; historical documentation from the Archive of Teguise and the Cabildo of Lanzarote.
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