JUAN GRANDE GRAN CANARIA

This small complex of church, manorial home and garden/palm grove (open to pre-cooked tours) belongs to the de Vega Grande family. The family's extensive estates consisted mostly of dry land, good only for growing tomatoes. But in the late 1950s it was Don Alejandro del Castillo, Count or Conde de la Vega Grande, who launched, in San Agustin, the first tourist development of southern Gran Canaria. By the 1970s the San Agustin/Playa del Ingles/Maspalomas resort was firmly on the tourist map and Gran Canaria had become a year-round holiday destination for northern Europeans. Tourism now accounts for 80 per cent of the gross national product of the island.