Before becoming a tourist destination, before its streets were walked every summer by thousands of visitors, and long before La Graciosa was officially recognized as the eighth inhabited island of the Canary Islands, living there meant facing a geography that conditioned practically everything on a daily basis. Even death.
For decades, the people of La Graciosa who died on the island could not be buried there. Their families had to cross the El Río strait with the corpse and, once they reached the coast of Lanzarote, face the climb up the Risco de Famara to take it to Haría. The Haría Town Hall preserves the memory of those funeral processions and confirms that those who died on La Graciosa were buried in the cemetery of Haría.
It was a final journey that summarized the entire life of a community forced to depend on the neighboring island.
On September 23, 1945, something began to change. On that day, the church dedicated to Nuestra Señora del Carmen was inaugurated in Caleta de Sebo, and the first mass was celebrated, officiated by Juan Alonso Vega, then canon of the Cathedral of Las Palmas.
The date was not a simple religious celebration. The church was part of an infrastructure program that was modifying the living conditions of the people of La Graciosa. And among those works was one that was especially significant: their own cemetery.
An inhabited island, but without a cemetery
La Graciosa began to have a permanent population from the 19th century. Around 1898, Caleta de Sebo and Pedro Barba already gathered more than thirty fishermen, mainly from the north of Lanzarote. Those first inhabitants lived in very precarious conditions and had fishing as their main means of subsistence.
But the island lacked many of the basic services that today seem inseparable from any population center. There was no stable school, no adequate port infrastructure, nor sufficient water tanks. There was also no cemetery.
That is why death forced them to leave the island.
Historical testimonies describe how the bodies were transported in small boats to the coast of Lanzarote. From there, another journey began: the ascent along the old path of the people of La Graciosa, up the slopes of the Risco de Famara, to reach Haría.
The scene is difficult to imagine today: a coffin crossing El Río, a family procession following the boat and, afterwards, men carrying the coffin along a narrow, steep path until reaching Haría.
A historical source from 1966 preserved in the Haría documentation describes the procedure: in La Graciosa, the coffin was even improvised with available wood, sometimes from dismantled boats; then, family and neighbors would cross El Río accompanying the coffin and begin the climb up the cliff to Haría.
It was not just a burial. It was another journey imposed by isolation.
García Escámez and the change of an island
The transformation began to take shape from 1943, when the then captain general of the Canary Islands, Francisco García Escámez, at the head of the Economic Command of the Canary Islands, promoted the provision of basic infrastructure for La Graciosa.
The academic research of José Alberto Galván Tudela documents that, from that moment on, different works were planned and executed: water tanks and cisterns, cemetery, church, school, and a small pier. Agricultural tools and four camels for farm work were also delivered.
The photographic documentation of the old Album of the Economic Command allows us to put figures to some of those actions. The cemetery appears with an investment of 12,000 pesetas and dated 1943; the church appears with a cost of 25,000 pesetas in 1944; the pier, with 13,000 pesetas, also in 1944, and a cistern with 5,000 pesetas.
Therefore, September 23, 1945, was not the day all that infrastructure suddenly appeared. It was the moment when the church was incorporated into the daily life of the community, within a material transformation that had already begun.
Water was also a matter of survival
The history of La Graciosa's isolation cannot be understood solely from burials. Water constituted another of the major problems.
Scarcity forced the careful storage of rainwater and made the population dependent on resources found outside the island. The infrastructure program of the forties incorporated several cisterns and tanks intended to improve supply.
But those works did not mean that La Graciosa had running water as we know it today. They were infrastructures intended to collect, store, and administer a scarce resource. Life continued to be hard.
A school, a pier, and a church
The construction of the church also had an urban effect. The Government of the Canary Islands points out that the temple was built in 1945 and that its appearance occurred at a time when Caleta de Sebo was beginning to consolidate as a population center.
The small fishing church was not, therefore, an isolated building. It was one more piece of a process that was shaping the town.
The school, the pier, and the hydraulic infrastructures also arrived. For a community accustomed to crossing El Río to get a good part of what it needed, each new infrastructure meant reducing a dependence.
September 23rd
That Sunday in September 1945, Juan Alonso Vega officiated the first mass in the new church of Nuestra Señora del Carmen.
The image has enormous symbolic force. Until then, the religious life of the Gracians was linked to the parishes of Lanzarote. The 1945 church did not yet mean parish independence: La Graciosa would have to wait until 1987 to have its own parish, according to local historical documentation.
But something had already begun in 1945. The island had a temple and also a cemetery. For the first time, the Gracians could live and die within the limits of their own island without the final farewell necessarily requiring crossing El Río.
Death as a measure of isolation
Perhaps no other story better explains what it meant to live in La Graciosa before that transformation.
To buy food, one had to cross; to sell fish, one had to cross; to carry out certain procedures, one had to cross; to attend certain religious services, one had to cross; and to bury the dead, one also had to cross.
Old tales of Gracian life speak of men and women who, from dawn, crossed to Lanzarote, disembarked with water up to their waists, and climbed the Risco loaded with fish to sell it in Yé, Máguez, or Haría. They then returned with gofio, cereals, and other products.
The Gracians' path was thus much more than a trail. It was a daily border. The sea separated the two islands, but the cliff made that separation even more visible.
The paradox of an island that started to have it all, little by little
The process of the forties did not end with isolation. La Graciosa continued to depend on Lanzarote for numerous services and supplies for decades.
But the new infrastructures marked a turning point. The island began to cease being just a small fishing community to become a stable population center.
The school prepared the children, the pier facilitated communications, the water tanks improved daily survival, the church created a religious and community space, and the cemetery did something even more profound: it allowed the dead to remain on the island where they had lived.
From that cemetery to the eighth island
The La Graciosa of 1945 is very far from the current one. That community of fishermen and farmers could not imagine the tourist transformation it would experience decades later.
Nor could it imagine that La Graciosa would eventually be officially recognized as the eighth inhabited island of the Canary Islands.
But the process of building that modern community began long before tourism. It began with much simpler things: with water, with a school, with a pier, with a church, and with a cemetery.
That is why September 23, 1945, can be read as a date that goes far beyond the inauguration of a temple.
That day, a mass gathered the Gracians around a newly built church. A few steps away, a cemetery was beginning to resolve one of the island's most painful dependencies. It was no longer necessary for every story to end on the other side of the sea.
Eighty-one years later
In September 2026, it is easy to look at La Graciosa from its beaches, its sandy paths, its bicycles, its white houses, or the tourist image it projects to the world.
But it is enough to look towards the Risco de Famara to remember another island: that of the men and women who crossed El Río at dawn, that of those who climbed up with fish on their backs, that of those who went down with gofio and food, that of the children who needed a school, that of the families who depended on Lanzarote for certain services, and that of those who, for years, had to accompany their dead by sea and then carry their coffins up the cliff to Haría.
On September 23, 1945, that story began to change.
Not because La Graciosa stopped depending on Lanzarote from one day to the next. It did not happen that way. But it began to have what turns a territory into a community: a place to learn, a place to meet, a place to pray, water to survive, and, finally, a place to bury its dead.
Eighty-one years later, that small church in Caleta de Sebo still stands and the cemetery continues to look out at the same landscape.
On the other side of the sea remains Lanzarote. But those who rest there no longer had to cross it to find their final resting place.
Documentary sources
• Government of the Canary Islands, CanariWiki, Church of Our Lady of Carmen of La Graciosa. • Haría City Council, historical documentation on ancient burials and the path of the Gracians.
• José Alberto Galván Tudela, research on the processes of appropriation and management of communal resources in La Graciosa.
• Memory of La Graciosa, documentation from the Album of the Economic Command of the Canary Archipelago and funds from Casa de Colón/Fedac.
• History of La Graciosa, historical documentation on the inauguration of the church and the life of the Gracian population.
• Historical and geographical studies on the transformations of La Graciosa during the period 1943-1967. • History of Haría, documentation on the deceased from La Graciosa buried in Haría.
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