Literary Tourism in the Canary Islands: Writers, Landscapes and Peripheral Spaces, focusing on the cases of Miguel de Unamuno and Agatha Christie

Elena María Pérez González (Universidad Europea de Canarias, Spain)

The Canary Islands constitute a singular context for literary tourism, shaped by their insular condition, peripheral position within Europe, and long-standing role as a space of passage, exile, and temporary residence for writers. Unlike metropolitan literary destinations structured around dense institutional networks, literary tourism in the Canary Islands has developed in a fragmented and uneven manner, combining formal literary sites with non-institutionalised literary presences linked to landscape, travel, and personal experience.

Literary tourism in the archipelago is closely connected to the relationship between writers and the island landscape. The volcanic terrain, the Atlantic environment, and the experience of isolation or distance from continental centres have recurrently influenced literary production and memory. In this sense, the Canary Islands function not only as settings for literary creation but also as cultural landscapes where writing, place, and biography intersect, an approach that has been highlighted in research on literary tourism and its connections with landscape and place (Arcos-Pumarola et al., 2020).

Two contrasting yet complementary cases illustrate these dynamics particularly well: Miguel de Unamuno’s exile in Fuerteventura and Agatha Christie’s stays in the islands.

Miguel de Unamuno was exiled to Fuerteventura in 1924 by the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. During his confinement on the island, Unamuno produced a significant body of reflective writing in which landscape, solitude, and political dissent converge. His work De Fuerteventura a París (1925) offers a literary interpretation of the island as a space of introspection and resistance, transforming Fuerteventura into a symbolic territory within Spanish literary history. Today, the Casa-Museo Unamuno in Puerto del Rosario represents the most institutionalised form of literary tourism associated with the author in the Canary Islands. The house preserves documents, personal objects, and interpretative materials related to his stay, situating Unamuno’s exile within its historical and political context.

The Casa-Museo Unamuno exemplifies a low-intensity model of an author’s house museum, characterised by limited visitor numbers, strong educational orientation, and close integration with the local cultural fabric. Unlike large literary museums in urban centres, its appeal lies less in spectacle than in authenticity and contextualisation. Literary tourists visiting the site are invited to engage with the relationship between writing, exile, and landscape, rather than with a monumentalised image of the author. This model aligns with broader trends in sustainable cultural tourism, in which literary heritage is embedded in local narratives and everyday spaces.

In contrast to this institutionalised site, Agatha Christie’s presence in the Canary Islands represents a form of literary tourism based on non-monumental traces and biographical memory. Christie visited the archipelago in the late 1920s, staying in Tenerife and Gran Canaria during a period of personal crisis. Although the islands do not feature explicitly as settings in her novels, Christie’s stay forms part of a wider narrative of travel, healing, and creative transition that has attracted growing interest among literary tourists.

Agatha Christie’s literary tourism in the Canary Islands is not centred on a house museum or a single physical site, but rather on hotels, landscapes, and routes associated with her travels. This type of literary tourism relies on storytelling, interpretation, and guided experiences rather than on preserved literary heritage buildings. It illustrates how literary tourism can emerge from temporary presence and experiential narratives, expanding the concept of literary place beyond fixed locations.

Together, the cases of Unamuno and Christie highlight the diversity of literary tourism practices in the Canary Islands. Although hybrid forms combining institutional heritage management with informal, experience-based interpretations can also be found in non-peripheral and non-insular contexts, in the Canary Islands, this hybridity acquires a specific meaning. It is shaped by insularity, fragmented cultural governance, discontinuous literary heritage initiatives and the central role of landscape in mediating literary memory. The archipelago, therefore, illustrates how literary tourism may operate in peripheral spaces through a combination of authors’ house museums, biographical traces, hotels, routes, festivals and landscape-based storytelling.

Beyond these international figures, the Canary Islands possess a rich literary tradition that remains only partially integrated into literary tourism strategies. Authors such as Benito Pérez Galdós, Tomás Morales, Alonso Quesada, Mercedes Pinto, María Rosa Alonso, Pedro García Cabrera, Josefina de la Torre and Rafael Arozarena offer particularly relevant possibilities for the development of literary routes, interpretative materials and place-based cultural experiences. Their works engage with questions of island identity, Atlantic imagination, social change, exile, gender, modernity and landscape. Although some authors are commemorated through museums, archives or cultural institutions, their incorporation into broader literary tourism narratives remains uneven across the archipelago. This underdevelopment points to a wider challenge: the need to move from isolated commemorative initiatives towards integrated literary tourism strategies capable of connecting local writers, island landscapes and contemporary cultural interpretation.

Recent research has emphasised the potential of cultural tourism to engage with intangible heritage, storytelling, place-making and the relationship between visitors and local communities (Richards, 2025). In the specific field of literary tourism, recent work has also shown how literary landscapes can contribute to cultural sustainability, collective memory and the diversification of local tourism economies (Rech et al., 2025). In this context, literary tourism in the Canary Islands offers an alternative approach to cultural tourism, emphasising slowness, interpretation and landscape-based experience. Rather than competing with large-scale tourism destinations, literary tourism initiatives may help diversify the cultural offering and foster more reflective forms of engagement with place. The Canary Islands thus exemplify how literary tourism can operate in peripheral spaces, drawing on biography, landscape and memory to construct meaningful cultural experiences beyond canonical literary centres.

How to cite this entry: Pérez González, E. M. (2026). Literary Tourism in the Canary Islands: Writers, Landscapes and Peripheral Spaces, focusing on the cases of Miguel de Unamuno and Agatha Christie. In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.), E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University for Foreigners of Perugia. https://doi.org/10.34623/zdg2-hn59

References

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