El cultivo de la caña de azúcar en Canarias en los inicios de la colonización

Resum

In spite of the scarcity of technical documents about the cultivation of sugar cane in the Canaries in the initial phases of the colonization, the large number of commercial contracts to be found in the protocols of the public notaries have allowed us to know about the development of the techniques, and their transfer to the americas, as well as about the personnel involved: the sugar growers («cañavereros»), those who stripped the leaves and knots from the plants («desburgadores»), those in charge of the irrigation («regadores»), and those dedicated to cleaning away the weeds («escardadores»). The work was very hard and tightly organized, from the preparation of the terrain, preparing the furrows, the season for sowing, the buying of the young plants, the plots of land («suertes») to sow, the work of tending («guarda y cura»), watering the cane, and finally cutting it down before extracting the sugar. The techniques originated in Madeira, and were not significantly different from those of other regions in the Peninsula. Once they had been developed in the Islands they were taken to the american continent by the Canarian experts and workers who had learned how to manage this crop.