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LIFE IN FUERTEVENTURA
Why the name of Fuerteventura?
Feb
If we add to the knowledge of a specific enclave, the origin of its toponymy, then we will be able to better understand its peculiarities.
Those who follow our blog will know that, at FuerteventurActiva, we have spoken on several occasions about the Majorera toponymy.
Today we want to dig into the origin of the name Fuerteventura.
Although, a priori, it may seem that the name of our beloved island is due to the generosity of the winds that beat it, its origin and meaning is quite different.
Before telling you where the name of Fuerteventura comes from, let’s take a little tour of the other denominations that the island had.
Since when have the Canary Islands been known?
The Canary archipelago, and especially Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, were already visited centuries before our era. The Tartessian navigators were the first to discover the islands and through them the Phoenicians and Greeks came to know them.
The Phoenicians, excellent sailors, traveled the African coast until they reached the Canary Islands, to capture large tuna and probably also to extract purple and orchilla.
The Phoenicians called our islands “Alizuth” , which we could translate as happy, antecedent of “Fortunate”. However, it may be that the name of Alizuth was extensive to refer, also, to other islands of Macaronesia, formed by the Canary Islands, Madeira, Azores, Salvajes and Cape Verde.
First references to Lanzarote and Fuerteventura
We have to understand that until just three centuries ago, the geographical references as well as the descriptions given by geographers were very vague, inaccurate, and ambiguous.
The first clear annotation of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura was given by Plutarco in the 1st century BC.
“These islands are two, separated by a narrow arm of the sea and distant from the coasts of Africa about a thousand stadia (174 km), called Fortunate and they experience very mild and periodic rains. (…)
The Romanization of Mauritania back in the 1st century AD. led to the expansion of the Roman Empire towards the Canary coasts. The Romans established various industries and fisheries on various islands of the archipelago. On the islet of Lobos they installed a workshop for the manufacture of getulic purple, a highly valued dye that is extracted from the cane. Lanzarote and Fuerteventura with their adjacent islets would thus be the islands that the Romans called the Purpurarías. .
Although it has been denied, for decades, that the Roman Purpurarías were Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, the fact of finding, in 2012, the Roman purple workshop in Lobos, puts these islands back on the map, like the Purpurarías.
The interest that the Canary Islands aroused in the king of Mauritania, Juba II, during the first century, led him to send several expeditions to the archipelago.
Later, Pliny the Elder, collected both the Roman stories that spoke of the Canary Islands, as well as the expeditions of Juba II. At that time, Fuerteventura was called Planasia.
It should be noted that, during the first years of our era, the Canaries were constantly and stably populated with catuli brought from Africa. Researchers still cannot agree on whether the colonization of the islands was voluntary or forced.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, in the 4th century AD, the Canary Islands were no longer in the spotlight on the great sea routes. However, there continued to be almost constant trade between the islands and Africa.
There were also geographers and poets from al-Andalus who named them.
In the middle of the 13th century the geographer Nafḥ al-ṭīb of al-Maqqarī wrote:
“And in the Ocean are the seven eternal islands, located west of the city of Salé. They appear visible to the naked eye on a clear day without calgine. “
The name of Fuerteventura
The first Europeans to settle on the islands were Genoese, specifically the brothers Ugolino and Vadino Vivaldi, who reached the shores of Lanzarote in 1291.
Since then countless Italian, Mallorcan, Andalusian, Castilian and Portuguese galleys have landed in Lanzarote and the other islands.
From these trips the current names of the islands began to emerge.
The first map in which the Islands with these new names appear is in the Angelino Dulcert Planisphere, made in Mallorca around 1339. On it appear the island of Lanzarotus Marocolus, the forte ventura , and the small island of Lobos.
The name “Forte Ventura” was given by the sailors of the time, with the meaning of “Great Fortunate”.
Three decades later, our island already appears as Fuerteventura.
The Erbania of the mahos
Erbania, or a similar word, is the name that the aborigines gave to Fuerteventura.
In the Franco-Norman chronicles of the conquest, in “Le Canarien”, more than 12 variants of Erbania appear, among them: Albanne, Arbanie, Albanye, Arbanne, Erbanye, Erbennye.
All of them are due to the fact that the copyists, who wrote the documents, did not recognize the Berber word that designated Fuerteventura, so they wrote a similar word and that it seemed to them with a familiar sound, in our case Albania
The name of Erbania is related to the Berber word Ar-bani that we can translate as “the place of the wall”, referring to the living stone wall built by the aborigines, on the isthmus that divided the island into two parts: Maxorata to the north and Jandía to the south.
Why is the name of Fuerteventura called Majorero?
The first writings that refer to the Mahoreros or Majoreros, such as the inhabitants of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, date from the end of the 15th century.
The aborigines of these two islands called themselves “majos”. There are still many readings regarding the origin. While for some historians, mahoh, is a Berber derivation of the word “Amazig” = “Sons of Magec”, or “Children of the Sun”, for other linguists it means “of the earth”, or it can even refer to its tribe of origin: the Maxies, or the Mauros.
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