Callao Salvaje's name is a description. In the Spanish of the Canaries a callao is a rounded beach pebble, the grey stones that cover many of the island's shores, and salvaje means wild.⁸ Until the late 1960s that was all there was here: a rough coast of pebbles and lava below the dry slopes of western Adeje, with La Gomera floating on the horizon. What turned it into a resort was not a village or a harbour but a piece of paper signed in Madrid.

The shore before the resort

This stretch of coast lay within the old menceyato of Adeje. Archaeological surveys between La Caleta and the boundary with Guía de Isora have found the remains of shepherds' huts on headlands near the ravines, outcrops of obsidian worked in aboriginal times and, at El Puertito, the remains of a hut with fine engravings scratched on the rocks beside it.⁴⁵ The nearest landing place was that small cove, El Puertito or Pris de Adeje, which documents of the sixteenth century already mention as a place to load orchil, the lichen used for dye, and which an account of 1780 described as good enough for small boats, though open to the winds.⁶ The nearby village of Armeñime carries a name that also appears in the legends collected by the nineteenth-century ethnographer Juan Bethencourt Alfonso, where Armeñime is a Guanche prince who fought his own nephew for the throne of Adeje.⁶

In the twentieth century the land behind the coast was farmed for export. Banana estates were already working in western Adeje in 1915, when the Harvard anthropologist Earnest Hooton stayed at the Fyffes plantation at Hoya Grande and excavated a burial cave with eight bodies in the Barranco de las Barandas, just north of Armeñime, until the authorities stopped him.⁴ In the 1950s and 1960s the slopes were cut into terraces for tomatoes; many were later abandoned, and some were replanted with bananas in the 1970s and 1980s, partly by Canarian emigrants returning from Venezuela.⁵

A Centre of National Tourist Interest

In 1963 Franco's government passed a law on Centres and Zones of National Tourist Interest (CITN). It offered private developers who built complete, well-equipped holiday towns a fast track through planning and a set of incentives, in exchange for a higher standard than was usual at the time. In practice the zones were never created and the law served mostly to approve individual resorts.²

Callao Salvaje was one of them. On 24 July 1969 a decree signed by Franco and by his tourism minister, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, declared "the planned development called Callao Salvaje" in the municipality of Adeje a Centre of National Tourist Interest. The application had been made by the architect Luis Cabrera Sánchez-Real on behalf of Juan Esquivel Castellano; the centre covered seventy hectares, and its promotion plan had been approved by the ministry earlier that month.¹ The decree granted the developers priority access to official credit, declared their projects to be of exceptional public utility, allowed them to obtain the seashore within the estate without the usual public auction, and authorised the compulsory sale of two small neighbouring plots if their owners did not build in line with the plan within two years.¹ Cabrera was one of the leading Canarian architects of the time and was working in those same years with Javier Díaz-Llanos and Vicente Saavedra on Ten Bel, the experimental holiday town at the other end of the south coast.⁷

Other Tenerife projects declared CITN in those years included the cliffs of Los Gigantes in Santiago del Teide (1964) and El Guincho in San Miguel de Abona (1967), as well as two beach developments in Santa Cruz.²³

From plan to place

The plan was one of a wave of tourist projects that Adeje approved on rural estates between 1968 and 1973.³ Building came slowly. When the town's planning rules were reviewed in 1982 and 1986, Callao Salvaje was listed with Costa Adeje, La Caleta and Playa Paraíso as urban land for tourism, and the 1986 reclassification opened space for tens of thousands of new tourist beds across the municipality.³ The archaeologists who surveyed the coast between 2004 and 2009 noted how hotels, apartment complexes and golf courses had replaced the farmland of the 1950s, and how some small coastal sites recorded in 1988 had disappeared.⁵ Today Callao Salvaje is a residential and holiday town of apartment blocks on the cliffs, with banana terraces still visible above it. Nearby, at El Puertito, a large new resort project was partly halted in 2022 after rock engravings and a rare endemic plant were found on the site.⁴