Early records of Ficus carica diversity in Canary Islands and its permanence as local names until recent times

Abstract

It is well known that the ancient settlers of the Canary Islands archipelago grew fig trees. Two lines of evidence, archeological and historical, indicate that rigs were a staple food in prehispanic times. After the Spanish conquest, figs also played an essential role in the subsistence of newly-arrived peasant communities. Such relevance, both cultural and agricultural, was clearly recorded in account books of landowners, testaments, correspondence of tenant farmers and h property descriptions. These archival records, mainly those dated between the 18(th) century and the late 19(th), have been checked and much information concerning fig diversity extracted by the authors. We reported in this paper early records of 15 fig landraces names, most of them still in use today to identify distinct rig varieties throughout the 7 islands of the Canaries as we have noted in our explorations. This evidence seems to show the importance of archival records as a tool to study fig diversity in the Canary Islands.