Arico

Long before the Spanish arrived, the territory around Arico was inhabited by the Guanches, the indigenous people of Tenerife. It formed part of the kingdom of Abona, though some historians argue that parts of the modern municipality belonged instead to the kingdom of Güímar. The Guanches lived in small cave settlements clustered in the main ravines, drawn there by water and the conditions of the land. One historian, Juan Bethencourt Alfonso, placed the Abona capital near what is now the village of El Río.

After the conquest, Castilian and Portuguese families settled here alongside migrants from Gran Canaria. They merged with the surviving Guanche population and continued the pastoral way of life already established. The settlement at Lomo de Arico took shape in the late sixteenth century, founded in part by the captain Juan González Gómez. Its consolidation as a proper community came with the building of a chapel dedicated to Saint John the Baptist in 1603. By 1639 that chapel had been elevated to a parish church, and in 1635 the settlement had acquired its own royal mayor.

In 1723 Arico absorbed the hamlet of Fasnia along with several rural districts separated from Güímar. Social stratification grew steadily through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a small class of landowners and large tenants controlling the best land while most farming families remained poor and landless.

Arico became a formal municipality in 1812 under the Cádiz Constitution, though this was not fully consolidated until 1836. A crisis in the cochineal trade in the late nineteenth century drove many people to emigrate to Cuba, but new export crops — tomatoes and potatoes — brought recovery. The lighthouse at Punta de Abona was built in 1899, opened in 1902, and served coastal navigation until 1978. In 1916 King Alfonso XIII granted Arico the title of town. The main southern road arrived in the 1920s, and from the 1940s and 1950s the Canal del Sur carried water from the highlands to the southern municipalities, enabling further expansion of export agriculture.

Arico has several officially protected cultural assets. The historic core of La Villa de Arico and the hamlet of Icor are both designated Historic Ensembles, and the Church of San Juan Bautista in La Villa holds the status of Historic Monument.

The church of San Juan Bautista anchors the old town and gives the village its main religious landmark. Elsewhere in the municipality, the Chapel of Our Lady of Mercedes stands on the site of an original building from 1514, though it was rebuilt at the start of the twentieth century. The Chapel of San Bartolomé dates from an earlier century and contains sculptures from the same period.

The most significant single artwork in the area is a Gothic sculpture of the Virgin of Tajo, housed inside the Church of La Luz. It was brought to the island during the conquest by the conquistador Jorge Grimón and is considered not only the most valuable piece in the local area but one of the most important in the entire Canary Islands, both for its sculptural quality and its history.

The old lighthouse at Punta de Abona, built in the nineteenth century, is another architectural point of interest. A new tower replaced it in 1978.

Religious festivals are spread across the municipality's many villages throughout the year, from San Juan Bautista in La Villa in June, through summer celebrations of the Virgin of Carmen and the Virgin of Fátima, to San Lucas in Icor in October. The Grain Fair held each April in Arico Nuevo, where breads from various countries are displayed, and the carnivals in Abades and La Sabinita, supported by the local council, draw strong local participation.