It was an entity for promoting the industry of the province of Las Palmas and was overtaken by the creation of Chambers of Commerce by Islands. In Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the Chamber remains provincial in logic because it knows perfectly well that informal entities do not work. This April 2026 marks 140 years since the Royal Decree creating the institution of the island, which, through twists of history, is kept alive thanks to the leftist president of the Cabildo of the island, Antonio Morales. A meager Chamber of Fuerteventura has representation in the council of the port of Las Palmas and, after it, that of Lanzarote will follow. An anachronism. If the Chamber of Commerce of Las Palmas was born from the drive of the businessmen of the port of this province 140 years ago, now it is a fiasco. The RAE dictionary defines fiasco as ‘broth with some leftovers of soup, crusts, vegetables, and legumes that was usually given to the poor at the doors of some convents.’
The objective was to ensure that the economic destiny of the Eastern Islands was decided in the offices of León and Castillo Street and not in distant ministries or foreign consulates. Now it focuses on providing courses, executing events, and a few other things, but it has not offered any economic opinions; it has not made any logical proposals for years. For example, it has no opinion on the 2026 oil crisis caused by the Middle East crisis. It maintains a kind of absurd ambiguity, believing that it will lose aid given the many years it has been in existence. Meanwhile, new employer associations are eating away at it.
At the end of the 19th century, Las Palmas was a hotbed of mercantile ambition that no longer fit within the confines of traditional institutions. The mixed scheme of the Royal Economic Society of Friends of the Country (RSAP) was anachronistic, and the Mercantile Circle, although active in the struggle against consumption taxes, had inevitably shifted towards the social and recreational. The Local Board of Commerce, for its part, was an inert body.
The power vacuum to articulate the interests of the ‘navigators’, industrialists, and merchants was filled by the Royal Decree of April 9, 1886. However, it was not until March 10, 1901, that a group of prominent figures decided that ‘local rearmament’ was urgent to counteract the growing dominance of foreign capital in the Port.
The Organizing Commission that signed the historic petition before the Minister of Agriculture, Industry, Commerce, and Public Works was headed by Antonio Gómez Navarro. Alongside him, the roster of founders read like a ‘who’s who’ of transatlantic trade: the Widow of Tomás Bosch y Sintes, Juan Bosch y Sintes, Miguel Curbelo Espino (the future ‘King of the Port’), Salvador Cuyás y Prat, Tomás Lozano Pérez, Antonio Castillo Santana, José Melián Marrero, and Enrique Sánchez Gaviria. The official authorization arrived on April 13, 1901.
The structure of power: The reign of Curbelo Espino
The Chamber was established with a strict hierarchy and division by electoral colleges covering Gran Canaria (Las Palmas, Arucas, Gáldar, Agüimes), Lanzarote (Arrecife), and Fuerteventura (Puerto Cabras). The first board of directors of 1901 laid the foundations: President: Antonio Gómez Navarro; vice president: Salvador Cuyás y Prats; general secretary: the banker from Fuerteventura Juan Rodríguez Quegles; accountant: Antonio Castillo Santana; and archivist-librarian, Pedro Ramírez Trinidad.
However, the figure who would mark the institution until 1936 was Miguel Curbelo Espino. He succeeded Gómez Navarro in 1903 and remained president almost uninterruptedly (except for a brief hiatus in 1927 due to conflicts with the Port Works Board) until 1928. Curbelo was not only the president of the merchants; he was the link with the Port Works Board (JOP), an institution that the Chamber itself urged to create in 1905.
Throughout the decades, other key names sustained the structure: vice presidents such as Tomás Lozano Pérez, Cástor Gómez Navarro, and Antonio Castillo Santana; secretaries like Antonio Saavedra Hernández and Martín Saavedra Ramos; and treasurers like Ignacio Cantero Afonso and Juan Díaz Benítez.
The business map: Merchants, Industrialists, and Navigators
The 1912 Regulations, based on the 1911 Law, imposed compulsory membership and mandatory payments. The electoral roll of the Chamber (Files 40 to 47 of the ACCINLP) shows explosive growth: from 1,087 voters in Las Palmas in 1917, it rose to 3,475 in 1936. The distribution of power in the Board reflected the island’s economy: Commerce, the dominant group, had 22 members by around 1930. Shipping companies were represented by consigners (6 members) and shipowners/fishing boat owners (2 members). Here, the presence of foreign firms was vital. Industry had five representatives, and artisans were incorporated starting in 1918.
The Chamber was not a smooth operation; it functioned as a lobby and pressure group against the State. One of the first clashes occurred in 1901, when the Chamber openly opposed the Royal Economic Society of Friends of the Country, which intended to tax the importation of cereals. The Chamber, championing the Free Ports Regime, defended market freedom and the ‘fullness of the economic effects’ of the franchises.
1927 and the provincial division
In 1902, the Chamber directly intervened in the real economy by appointing a commission to set the ‘Tariffs for unloading goods.’ This generated tensions with coal companies, which suspected favoritism towards local shippers. The struggle for local control also occurred in the auction of duties. The Chamber supported the Association of Free Port Duties of Gran Canaria, Lanzarote, and Fuerteventura against the Leased Company, causing an internal fracture among its own associates. And it is better not to comment on the significant role it played in the provincial division of 1927.
With the arrival of the Second Republic, the stability of the Curbelo era was blown apart. After a brief Managing Commission, the presidency fell to Juan Miranda Márquez, who navigated the years of political instability supported by directors like Dionisio Bautista Martín, Isidro Brito González, and secretaries Eduardo Azofra del Campo and Francisco Caballero Rodríguez. The Civil War would put an end to this phase of ‘free organization,’ transforming the Chamber, from 1936 onward, into a mere organism managing private interests in the face of the new State. But by then, the Chamber of Las Palmas had already achieved its foundational objective.
