First electric lighting

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria · Category: Memory · Subcategory: Memory spaces · Year: 1870

If it was not the first to install a permanent public electric lighting service in the Canary Islands (that was Santa Cruz de La Palma in 1892), the city of Las Palmas was instead the first where electricity was experimented with in the street as a trial and temporarily. 

In a brief note published in the newspaper La Verdad of Las Palmas on 16 July 1870, we find the following:

"A few nights ago an electric light trial was carried out in Santo Domingo square, the results of which were very satisfactory. As we have been informed, it seems that it is planned to install it for one night in our Alameda."

It was a complete novelty and although it was necessary to wait until 1899 for the city’s definitive public lighting to be inaugurated, this first display of electric light announced the grand future of this technical advance, now indispensable in our daily lives.

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