In 1634 Cardinal Richelieu's France ruled that the world began on a small volcanic island off the coast of Africa. El Hierro was the westernmost land anyone in Europe could name, so French maps counted their longitude from it, as other maps had done on and off since Ptolemy, and for centuries a good part of the Continent measured the earth from an island most of its users never saw. Then Greenwich took the job, and the Canary Islands found other work.
Most of it is on the big islands. More than fourteen million visitors a year come for the beaches and the winter sun of Tenerife, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, and Teide, the highest peak in Spain, is worth the trip to Tenerife on its own. The name, as it happens, comes from the Latin for dogs. The bird was named after the islands, not the other way round.
If the point is quiet, we would go to the small end of the chain. El Hierro has about 11,000 people, buildings held to two floors and most of its land protected, and it is the one island where a pier with five rooms on it counts as development. From the lighthouse at Orchilla, on its western tip, the next land is America, and the sea in front of it is where the numbers used to start.
