Una contribución al estudio de las tensiones sociales generadas por el agua en la Historia de España. El caso del regadío en la ciudad de Santa Cruz de Tenerife durante la guerra y la posguerra europeas, 1914-1919

Abstract

In the years of the I World War, the Canary Islands suffered an awful socioeconomic crisis for the progressive collapse of the port traffic and the parallel closing of the markets that consumed the fruit production. In consequence, the islanders didn´t have another option thar to face their crude reality, that to get overturned on the resources that offered them the insular environment for getting the subsistences and the basic things that traditionally they import from western Europe. In the final stretch of the war, when the archipelago only conserved the state marine connections, a strong drought that, then, it continued along the first year of postwar period, aggravate the situation. In such a chaotic joint, the extraordinary value that acquired the irrigation water, the unequal interests of the different social sectors, with their corresponding ramifications in the political formations of the time, entered in collision in the microspace that conformed the city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The detonator of the conflict was the mobilization of the big landowners with the intention of getting all the irrigation water, attitude that dissapear spontaneously when, with the reappearance of the rains and the reactivation of the fruit export, the islands recovered the normality. In the margin of their own readings, that was a confrontation that, in broad outline, it advanced the one that they must play in the years of the Republic, when the fruit sector had reached its maximum development, the producers and the middlemen for the international consecuences of the collapsed of the Bag of New York.