El Puerto de Mogán is the kingdom of sea and land
The sun sets the pace for life in southern Gran Canaria, blurring the borders between worlds
The sun is the clock that sets the pace for life in these waters, and its rays are the hands that show the hours and minutes as they tick by. The skipjack tuna that surge through Mogán’s water in the summer only rise to the surface in daylight to feed off the yellow tails, headstanders or mackerel. As soon as the light begins to fail, they return to the depths. They are children of the light, bound to it. Their force is titanic, capable of travelling up to one hundred kilometres a day, although they are lost without the day’s guiding light.
This demonstrates just how much the ocean and the land blur together in southern Gran Canaria. The inhabitants of each world are constantly interacting. If they can’t see each other, they seek each other out. The sailors who live on higher ground keep their eyes trained on the sea, seeking a ripple on the surface or birds plunging over the water to reveal the presence of fish.
There is no kingdom without treasure, and this subtle blue blanket hides all sorts of wealth. Some is hidden in chests drifting around the oceans until they reach this coast, such as ambergris separated by the sperm whales, which was more valuable than gold back in the day and a real bonanza for any shellfish farmers who came across it on a beach lost in the depths of a ravine. The people living on land dreamed of oceanic fortunes deposited miraculously on the shore.
In other times, these land dwellers moved along the scarps to collect the precious orchilla lichen to make dyes. They also walked for miles to fish like a muttonbird, sometimes for whole days at a time, barely without a break. They even knew all the watering holes or springs along the cliffs. On their return to Puerto de Mogán, they slept in its maze of steep neighbourhoods, in homes whose hallways were decorated with buoys, ropes, shells and anchors reminding us that the land here is just a continuation of the Atlantic.
You can’t see it from here but there is a sculpture close by of a boy grasping a small iron harpoon, a bronze reminder of children who scoured the coastline at low tide to help feed their families. Traditional fishing boats continue to set sail from the modern Puerto de Mogán with a crew that still feels an ancestral pull as the tuna yank their line. Anyone who swims in this transparent calm and enjoys this almost everlasting sunshine perhaps is not aware of it, but the light that moves them is the same light that orchestrates the movements along these feudal liquid borders.
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