A statue in honour of the women who worked in Lanzarote’s fish canning industry was unveiled on Friday afternoon.
The statue, by local artist Cintía Machín, is located on the central reservation of Arrecife’s inner ring-road, near the new Open Mall shopping centre. The shopping centre itself was built upon the site of the old Garavilla fish canning factory.
Until tourism took off in the 1980s, fish canning was Lanzarote’s most important industry accounting for 70% of the island’s income at the start of the 1980s. 80% of the employees in the sector were women, who started work at 13 or 14 years old and laboured in difficult conditions, often becoming their family’s main breadwinner.
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