Islote de Fermina

The history of Puerto del Arrecife is linked to fishing activity, to its small docks and to its coastline, punctuated by islets that emerge off the coast. One of the largest of these is Fermina Islet.

The oldest name given to the land that emerges off the beach of El Reducto in the capital is Islote del Quebrado. The name Fermina, and not “de la Fermina” as some people tend to say and see it written, especially by foreign journalists, comes from the use that the Lanzarote businesswoman of the same name made of it as a shipyard and boat building site in the first decades of the last century.

In 1918, the Navy Command granted the entrepreneur and shipowner Fermina García Santana an administrative concession to set up a shipyard on the Islote del Quebrado, in La Destila, next to the beach of El Reducto. There they built a sloop called “La Fermina”, as well as the popular “El Rafael”, and some other smaller vessels. Since then, this area of the capital of Lanzarote has been known as Islote de Fermina.

In 1968, the company of the now disappeared Caja de Ahorros, together with the Community of Councils of the province of Las Palmas, set up the tourist company Protucasa which, in Lanzarote, would be responsible for the construction of the Arrecife Gran Hotel (in the picture under construction), the Hotel Lancelot and the tourist complex La Santa.

Under the direction of Juan Marrero Portugués, Protucasa commissioned the artist César Manrique to fit out the Parque Islas Canarias, the gardens of the Gran Hotel and some work on the Islote de Fermina following the success of the Canarian artist with his work on Los Jameos del Agua and Lago Martiánez, in Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife. It was at that time that the name Islote del Amor (Islet of Love) was coined, a nickname that arose as a result of the custom of the most uninhibited couples to go there to unburden their genesic urges.

This Islote del Quebrado, de la Fermina, or del Amor was connected to the land by a long wooden bridge that starts next to the Gran Hotel Arrecife.

A secondary toponymic element of this islet is La Punta del Callao, its eastern end, a name which, as I have heard it said, comes from this type of stone which the coastal ships of the inter-island service used to bring as ballast and throw in the vicinity before entering the Puerto del Arrecife.