Alcalá sits on a low platform of black lava on the west coast of Tenerife, a few kilometres north of Playa San Juan, looking straight across the water at La Gomera. It is a village of fishermen's houses, a little harbour and a chapel, now flanked by banana plantations and large hotels. Its documented history is short, but the rocks it stands on and the shells left by its first visitors tell a much older story.

Lava and limpets

The coast here was built by volcanoes long before anyone lived on Tenerife. Two lava flows reached the sea near Alcalá: one from Montaña Botija, between Guía de Isora and Chío, which ends just south of the beach, and one from Montaña de Chío, which runs out between Alcalá and Playa San Juan. Both have been dated to several thousand years ago, before the island was first settled.¹ The tongues of lava that run into the sea form the little coves and rock pools that shape the village.

The Guanches came to this shore to fish and gather shellfish. On one of those lava tongues, about 20 metres above the sea, archaeologists have recorded a shell midden of more than 400 square metres, known locally as La Caja del Dinero, "the money box": a mound of limpets, top shells and other molluscs, mixed with aboriginal pottery and flakes of obsidian and basalt. Nearby a natural rock shelter, partly closed by a stone wall and with a view over the whole coast, held the same kind of debris.¹ On the hills of La Tablada, above Alcalá, a large scatter of pottery and shells and a small stone structure suggest a lookout over the coast of Alcalá and Varadero.¹ The archaeologists read the coastal sites of Guía de Isora as seasonal camps, used for herding, shellfish gathering and fishing.¹

A chapel and a road

The village that grew up around the cove after the conquest kept its fishing tradition.⁴ Its chapel is dedicated to the Virgin of Candelaria. The art historian María Jesús Riquelme recorded two images there in the 1980s: an anonymous nineteenth-century figure modelled on the lost original of Candelaria, by then retired to the sacristy, and a larger dressed image made in 1970 by the sculptor Ezequiel de León, placed in a niche of the main altarpiece.²

Getting to Alcalá was long a problem. According to the local historian Marcos Brito, the coast road from Playa San Juan was built only in the early 1930s; along the way stood the salt pans of Fonsalía, just outside Alcalá.³ The archaeological survey of the municipality likewise stresses how isolated this part of the island remained until roads were built in the 1930s.¹

Today

The terraces behind Alcalá are now covered with banana plantations, and large hotels have been built on the coast nearby. The village has kept its fishing harbour and its pier, from which boats still go out, and its seafront fish restaurants are its best-known attraction.⁴