Núñez de la Peña

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria · Category: Literature · Subcategory: Literary street map

Juan Núñez de la Peña (La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain, late May 1641 - 3 January 1721). Spanish scholar and historian.

He studied Latin and Humanities at the Colegio de San Agustín de La Laguna and later followed the ecclesiastical state, receiving minor orders. As a young man, he travelled to the peninsula, settling in Toledo, where he worked as a notary. He would return to the Canary Islands in the retinue of Bishop Bartolomé Jiménez. Upon his return, he began to collect data and documents that would serve him to write the book by which he would be remembered, Conquista y antigüedades de la isla de la Gran Canaria y su descripción, con muchas advertencias de sus privilegios, conquistadores, pobladores y otras particularidades en la muy poderosa isla de Tenerife, dirigido a la milagrosa imagen de Nuestra Señora de Candelaria . This work was published in 1676, being reissued three years later with corrections by its author.

As a result of the investigations he undertook for the composition of his work, he dedicated himself to researching municipal, notarial, and ecclesiastical documents, especially those arriving at the Ayuntamiento de Tenerife (Tenerife City Council). Thus, he compiled a book with the municipal ordinances, managing to save very important documents to understand and interpret life in the Canary Islands in his time. He also researched the genealogy of almost all the surnames of the archipelago. For his work at the Ayuntamiento de Tenerife, he was rewarded by the Crown with a pension of 200 pesos and the title of general chronicler of the kingdoms of Castilla y León.

A plaque honours and commemorates his memory in the church of San Agustín de La Laguna.

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