Why could nobody be buried on La Graciosa before 1945?

The island had no cemetery. According to Historia de Haría, drawing on the Diario de Las Palmas of 28 June 1966, the dead were taken across El Río and carried up the Risco de Famara to Haría.

When was the cemetery built?

In 1943, for 12,000 pesetas, as part of the investments of the Mando Económico de Canarias — according to Memoria de Lanzarote.

Who is the church dedicated to?

The Virgen del Carmen, patroness of fishermen, known on the island as the Virgen del Mar. Her feast day is 16 July.

Since when has La Graciosa counted as the eighth Canary Island?

Since 26 June 2018, when the Spanish Senate recognised it unanimously. It still has no island council of its own.

How many people live there today?

718 on 1 January 2022, according to ISTAC. No more recent official figure for the island has been published.

81 years: when La Graciosa carried its dead by sea

When La Graciosa carried its dead across the sea: 81 years of the Caleta de Sebo church

Until the mid-1940s La Graciosa had no cemetery. Anyone who died on the island was laid in a coffin improvised from old boat timber, taken across the El Río strait and carried up the Risco de Famara to Haría — as the local history site Historia de Haría describes it, citing the Diario de Las Palmas of 28 June 1966. On 23 September 1945 the first mass was celebrated in the new church at Caleta de Sebo. That was 81 years ago — and it began a run of buildings that gave the island a life of its own for the first time.

24 September 2026 · By Julia Roca Bethencourt · 5 min · Editorial responsibility: Matthias Camenzind, Editor-in-Chief

An island without a cemetery

La Graciosa was settled late: according to Historia de Teguise, permanent houses only appeared after 1852, when Rafael Cappa Maqueda applied to open a fish-salting works. Around 1900 some 100 people lived there, 160 by 1910. Everything else was missing: no church, no school, no cemetery.

Historia de Haría quotes an account from the Diario de Las Palmas of 28 June 1966: the coffin was improvised from old wood, usually from broken-up boats, then came the crossing of El Río and the climb up the cliff to Haría. The strait is about two kilometres wide at its narrowest; the Risco de Famara behind it is a wall several hundred metres high. Generations of gracioseras took the same route to sell their fish on Lanzarote.

23 September 1945

The exact day comes from La Voz de Lanzarote. Emilio Hernández Domínguez writes there that on this date the first mass was celebrated in the new church at Caleta de Sebo, by Juan Alonso Vega, magistral of the cathedral of Las Palmas. For the date and the priest's name, that is the only source we could find.

Independently of it, the Canary education department's CanariWiki and the Memoria de Lanzarote photographic archive both date the Iglesia de Nuestra Señora del Carmen to 1945. It has a single nave and a thoroughly maritime interior: an altarpiece shaped like a ship, a pulpit in the form of a ship's wheel, an altar resting on an iron anchor. Its patroness is the Virgen del Carmen, known on the island as the Virgen del Mar.

25,000 pesetas — and where they came from

The church was not a one-off. Alongside a photograph from 1945, Memoria de Lanzarote lists four works with their costs: cemetery 12,000 pesetas (1943), church 25,000 pesetas (1944), landing stage 13,000 pesetas (1944), cistern 5,000 pesetas. Converting to euros does not help: nominally about 150 euros for the church, which says nothing about 1944 purchasing power.

The money came through the Mando Económico de Canarias, a military administration set up in 1941 which, according to Memoria de Lanzarote, had raised around 32.8 million pesetas for infrastructure by 1946. The driving figure was Francisco García Escámez, captain general of the Canaries; Historia de Teguise credits him with La Graciosa's church, school, cemetery and small quay. That an authoritarian regime staged this as a favour is part of the story.

Electricity only in 1985, water in the early 1990s

How long the road still was afterwards was summed up by Saúl García in the Diario de Lanzarote on 12 April 2024: in 1943 three cisterns in Caleta del Sebo and one in Pedro Barba; in 1977 a desalination plant producing 75 cubic metres a day, run by generators that supplied twelve hours of power daily; in 1985 the submarine cable that brought uninterrupted electric light for the first time; in the early 1990s a submarine pipeline connecting the island to Lanzarote's water supply.

So forty years lie between that first mass and permanent electricity. The telephone arrived in between: in 1987 Telefónica opened an exchange with 300 lines, according to the archive project Historia de la Graciosa.

Today: eighth island, 718 inhabitants

On 1 January 2022 ISTAC counted 718 inhabitants on La Graciosa. There is no official figure for 1 January 2026: the official counts run only to 2025 for municipalities, and only the breakdown by settlement, which ends in 2022, lists La Graciosa separately.

On 26 June 2018 the Spanish Senate unanimously recognised La Graciosa as the eighth inhabited Canary Island. Administratively nothing changed: the island still belongs to the municipality of Teguise and has no island council of its own; since 30 June 2026 the Lanzarote body has at least been called the Cabildo Insular de Lanzarote y La Graciosa. On water, the next step is due: under the EU project ICONIC, trial operation of a solar-powered seawater desalination plant begins in 2026.