The culmination of the conquest of the island of Tenerife in 1496 concluded the process of European territorial dominion of the Canary Islands, with the incorporation of this island under the royal jurisdiction of the Crown of Castile. At the time, before the impact of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas was fully felt, the archipelago already held an essential strategic position in the maritime traffic of the south Atlantic, the ‘Atlantic Mediterranean’, as described in maritime historiography. In this context of the inception of colonisation, the insular port system developed from very early on to become a space offering essential connections to the exterior, both in import and export processes; it was also crucial for the military provision of fleets frequenting the African coastline, and to the consolidation of the American route. In the following decades, with the exponential and rapid growth of maritime traffic between Europe, Africa and America, the islands further consolidated their geostrategic significance, to become an essential enclave within this tricontinental navigation.

Being an island territory, all connections, those of Tenerife in particular, and of the other islands in general, were done by sea. In this sense, it is important to underline that during those initial stages, port infrastructures were part of a much wider set of infrastructures of all sorts; these had to be put in place if the islands were to be inhabited and exploited to European socioeconomic standards. This makes the Canarian case an exceptional model for analysis, where, rather than witnessing a gradual process of maritimisation, the crucial importance of maritime communications for the whole territory suggests privileged investments and interventions in those spaces. However, as we shall see in the following pages, throughout the sixteenth century, interisland, intra-island and exterior maritime traffic developed under deficient material conditions.